“Empower every person and every
organisation on the planet to achieve more”
The Microsoft Mission

At the core of today’s opening Worldwide Partner Conference keynote was ‘Digital Transformation’ aka the desire of CEO’s to use technology to change business outcomes – whether it be how they:

Engage their customers,

Empower employees to make better decisions,

Optimise their operations,

Build up the predictive power within their organisations so that every operation is intelligent,

Transform their products and services.

Digital Transformation = An Unprecedented Partner Opportunity

Every customer of every size business (startup to Enterprise) is not only looking to use digital technology, but to build digital technology for their own.

Businesses are looking to drive greater efficiency – automating processes and enhancing productivity, particularly in those areas where there are operating expenses. This poses an unprecedented opportunity for you no matter what partner type you are.

Microsoft Ambitions to Drive Digital Transformation

Microsoft has three core ambitions which play a fundamental part in digitally transforming businesses:

Re-inventing Productivity and Business process

Building the Intelligent Cloud

Create more Personal Computing

These will be covered in more detail over the next two days keynotes, however, Satya provided some great examples of what these 3 ambitions entail.

1) Re-inventing Productivity and Business Process

This is all about removing the barriers between productivity tools and business applications. Satya focused on two key areas:

To showcase how intelligent cloud is helping transformation, Satya invited General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, on stage to discuss how he has digitally transformed the GE business.

Considering GE is over 140 years old, it’s a company that has embraced transformation and digital transformation. You can read more about their story and find out about Microsoft’s new partnership with GE to bring Predix to Azure, accelerating digital transformation for industrial customers.

Satya then went on to talk about ‘The next phase of building the Intelligent cloud’ with ‘Cognitive services’. We’re seeing the beginnings of a new platform for cognitive services. Microsoft has taken decades of research from Microsoft Research encapsulating speech, computer vision, natural language text understanding, and made these available as API’s. These API’s are being used to infuse perception into apps – the ability for Apps/Bots to understand speech and see i.e. computer vision. These cognitive capabilities are capable of transforming business by bringing productivity gains. A great example of this is how Macdonalds are creating efficiency in their Drive Thru’s with speech/order recognition (Watch the demo 1 hour 10 minutes into the Day 1 keynote).

3) Create More Personal Computing

Create more personal computing was the third and final ambition covered. Satya discussed Windows 10 – an OS system spanning multiple devices from Raspberry PI to Hololens and bringing centralised infrastructure benefits and cost savings to business.

It was on the topic of Hololens, he discussed how personal computing is shaped by category creation moments. Moments where input and output change. ‘Mixed Reality’ is that moment. With Hololens its created an interface changing moment – Mixing real with virtual, enabling us to be anywhere and everywhere – fully untethered and mobile.

The three ambitions announced a year ago and the proof-points of healthy progress along them in FY16:

Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:
– core part of an overarching strategy
– digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

“Reinvent Productivity and Business Processes“, “Build the Intelligent Cloud” and “Create More Personal Computing” were the original 3 “interlocking ambitions” the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago. The proof-points of FY16 progress are shown along that list, and explained in detail by remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016.

In fact, this last quarter, some of the most strategic announcements were all around our application platform. At our partner conference, there was a significant amount of excitement with the tools that we announced like PowerApps and Power BI, Azure functions and Flow. These are tools that our developers and system integrators and solution partners will use in order to be able to customize applications around Azure. And so to me that’s another huge advantage and a competitive differentiation for us.

1.1 Core part of an overarching strategy

The move to the cloud for our customers and for us is not just about a new way of delivering the same value just as a SaaS service. It’s really the transformation from having applications that are silos to becoming more services in the cloud where you can reason about the activity and the data underneath these services to benefit the customers who are using these services. So that’s what this notion of a graph [by Microsoft Graph] represents.

So when somebody moves to Office 365, their graph [by Microsoft Graph], their people, their relationships with other people inside the organization, their work artifacts all move to the cloud. You can connect them with all the business process data that’s in Dynamics 365, but not just in Dynamics 365 but all the applications in AppSource because business process will always be a much more fragmented market as opposed to just one market share leader by industry, by vertical, by country. And so that’s our strategy there.

And now the professional cloud or the professional network helps usage across all of that professional usage. Whether it’s in Office 365 or whether you’re a salesperson using any application related to sales, you want your professional network there. Of course, it’s relevant in recruiting, it’s relevant in training, it’s relevant in marketing. So that’s really our strategy with LinkedIn as the professional network meeting the professional cloud. And these are all part of one overarching strategy, and ultimately it’s about adding value to customers.

1.2 Digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

This past year was a pivotal one in both our transformation and in our partnerships with customers who are also driving their own digital transformation. Our progress is best captured in the results of our three ambitions, starting with Productivity and Business Process. In a world of infinite information but finite attention and time, we aim to change the nature of work with digital technology. In pursuit of this ambition, we continue to add value to our products, grow usage, and increase our addressable market. Along these lines, let me start with Office 365 and then move to Dynamics 365.

In the last quarter, we advanced our collaboration tools. We launched Microsoft Planner, which helps teams manage operations, as well as Skype Meetings, which is aimed at helping small businesses collaborate. In June, we further strengthened our security value proposition with the release of Advanced Security Management.

Lastly, we continue to add intelligence in machine learning to Office to help people automate their tasks and glean insights from data. These advancements helped to drive increased usage across enterprises, small and medium businesses, and consumers. In the enterprise, Office 365 Commercial seats grew 45% year over year, and revenue grew 59% in constant currency. Also 70% of our Office Enterprise agreement renewals are in the cloud. Innovative companies like Facebook, Hershey’s, Discovery Communications, Cushman Wakefield all adopted Office 365 and now see how transformative this service can be for their own business.

We are enthusiastic about the early feedback and growth opportunity from companies using our newly released Office 365 E5, which includes powerful security controls, advanced analytics, and cloud voice. These customers tell us that they love the simplification that comes with standardizing across all of our productivity workloads.

We will continue to grow our install base and drive premium mix through offers like Office 365 E5, but they’re very, very early days of E5. And E5 value proposition across all three of the areas, whether it’s cloud voice or analytics or security are all three massive areas for us. And I would say if anything, the initial data from our customers around security is gaining a lot of traction. But at the same time, one of the things that customers are looking for is making an enterprise-wide architectural decision across all of the workloads.

We see momentum in small and medium businesses, with a growing number of partners selling Office 365, now up to nearly 90,000, a 25% increase year over year. We continue to grab share and adding over 50,000 customers each month for 28 consecutive months.

We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers. Across segments, customers increasingly experience the power of Office on their iOS and Android mobile devices. In fact, we now have more than 50 million iOS and Android monthly active devices, up more than four times over last year.

Now let’s talk about progress with the other pillar of this ambition, Dynamics 365. We are removing any impedance that exists between productivity, collaboration, and business process. This month we took a major step forward with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Dynamics 365 provides business users with purpose-built SaaS applications. These applications have intelligence built in. They integrate deeply with communications and collaboration capabilities of Office 365.

Dynamics 365 along with AppSource and our rich application platform introduces a disruptive and customer-centric business model so customers can build what they want and use just the capabilities they need. The launch of Dynamics 365 builds on the momentum we’re already seeing in this business. Customers around the globe are harnessing the power of Dynamics in their own transformation, including 24 Hour Fitness and AccuWeather. Overall, Dynamics now has nearly 10 million monthly paid seats, up more than 20% year over year, and Q4 billings grew more than 20% year over year.

Overall, Business Processes represent an enormous addressable market, projected to be more than $100 billion by 2020. It’s a market we are increasingly focused on, and I believe we are poised with both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource to grow and drive opportunity for our partners.

Across Office 365 and Dynamics 365, developers increasingly see the opportunity to build innovative apps and experiences with the Microsoft Graph, and we now have over 27,000 apps connected to it. Microsoft AppSource will be a new way for developers to offer their services and reach customers worldwide.

Lastly, with Office 365 and Dynamics 365, we have the opportunity to connect the world’s professional cloud and the world’s professional network with our pending LinkedIn deal. Overall, the Microsoft Cloud is winning significant customer support. With more than $12 billion in Commercial Cloud annualized revenue run rate, we are on track to achieve our goal of $20 billion in fiscal year 2018. Also, nearly 60% of the Fortune 500 companies have at least three of our cloud offerings. And we continue to grow our annuity mix of our business. In fact, commercial annuity mix increased year over year to 83%.

Note that the Q1FY16 report was that “Enterprise Mobility [Suite] customers more than doubled year-over-year to over 20,000, and the installed base grew nearly 6x year-over-year“. Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is a service available in the CSP (Cloud Solution Partner program) along with Windows Intune, Office 365, Azure and CRM Online. The reason for that very impressive growth was given by Satya Nadella in the much earlier Q2FY15 report as:

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite is one key of product innovation that I would like to highlight given the growth and uniqueness of our offering. Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution that brings together mobile device management, mobile application management, hybrid identity management and data protection into a unified offering via EMS.

Office 365 now includes new app experiences on all phones and tablets for mobile productivity. Further, we have released completely new scenarios. This includes Office Sway for visualizing and sharing ideas; Delve, to help search and discover content; Office 365 Groups to make it easier to collaborate; andOffice 365 Video for secure media streaming for businesses.

Finally, we continue to invest in enterprise value by integrating MDM and the Enterprise Mobility Suite into Office 365; new encryption technologies and compliance certifications; and new eDiscovery capabilities in Exchange.

…

Overall at the highest level, our strategy here is to make sure that the Microsoft Services i.e. cloud services be it Azure, Office 365, CRM Online or Enterprise Mobility Suite are covering all the devices out there in the marketplace. So that, that way we maximize the opportunity we have for each of these subscription and capacity based services.

2.1 Enterprise cloud leadership

Now let’s get into the specifics of the Intelligent Cloud, an area of massive opportunity, as we are clearly one of the two enterprise cloud leaders. Companies looking to digitally transform need a trusted cloud partner and turn to Microsoft. As a result, Azure revenue and usage again grew by more than 100% this quarter. We see customers choose Microsoft for three reasons. They want a cloud provider that offers solutions that reflect the realities of today’s world and their enterprise-grade needs. They want higher level services to drive digital transformation, and they want a cloud open to developers of all types. Let me expand on each.

To start, a wide variety of customers turn to Azure because of their specific real-world needs. Multinationals choose us because we are the only hybrid and hyperscale cloud spanning multiple jurisdictions. We cover more countries and regions than any other cloud provider, from North America to Asia to Europe to Latin America. Our cloud respects data sovereignty and makes it possible for an enterprise application to work across these regions and jurisdictions. More than 80% of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers because of our leadership support for regulatory requirements, advanced security, and commitment to privacy. Large ISVs like SAP and Citrix as well as startups like Sprinklr also choose Azure because of our global reach and a broad set of platform services. Last week GE announced it will adopt our cloud for its IoT approach.

Next, Azure customers also value our unique higher-level services. Now at 33,000, we nearly doubled in one year the number of companies worldwide that have selected our Enterprise Mobility Solutions. The Dow Chemical Company leverages EMS along with Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics to give its thousands of employees secure real-time access to data and apps from anywhere.

Just yesterday, we announced Boeing will use Azure, our IoT suite, and Cortana Intelligence to drive digital transformation in commercial aviation, with connected airline systems optimization, predictive maintenance, and much more. This builds on great momentum in IoT, including our work with Rolls-Royce, Schneider Electric, and others.

This is great progress, but our ambitions are set even higher. Our Intelligent Cloud also enables cognitive services. Cortana Intelligence Suite offers machine learning capabilities and advanced predictive analytics. Customers like Jabil Circuit, Fruit of the Loom, Land O’Lakes, LIBER already realize the benefits of these new capabilities.

Lastly, central to our Intelligent Cloud ambition is providing developers with the tools and capabilities they need to build apps and services for the platforms and devices of their choice. We have the best support for what I would say is the most open platform for all developers. Not only is .NET first class but Linux is first class, Java is first class. The new Azure Container service cuts across both containers running on Windows, running across Linux. So again, it speaks to the enterprise reality. .NET Core 1.0 for open source and our ongoing work with companies such as Red Hat, Docker, and Mesosphere also reflects significant progress on this front. We continue to see traction from open source, with nearly a third of customer virtual machines on Azure running Linux.

So those would be the places where we are fairly differentiated, and that’s what you see us gaining both for enterprise customers and ISVs.

On the server side, premium server revenue grew double digits in constant currency year over year. New SQL Server 2016 helps us expand into new markets with built-in advanced analytics and unparalleled performance. More than 15,000 customers, including over 50% of the Fortune 500, have registered for the private preview of SQL Server for Linux. And we’re not slowing down. We will launch Windows Server 2016 and System Server 2016 later this year.

2.2 Every customer is also an ISV

One of the phenomena now is that pretty much anyone who is a customer of Azure is also in some form an ISV, and that’s no longer just limited to people who are “in the classic tech industry” or the software business. So every customer who starts off consuming Azure is also turning what is their IP in most cases into an ISV solution, which ultimately will even participate in AppSource. So at least the vision that we have is that every customer is a digital company that will have a digital IP component to it, and that we want to be able to partner with them in pretty unique ways.

That’s the same case with GE. It’s the same case with Boeing. It’s the same case with Schneider Electric or ABB or any one of the customers we are working with because they all are taking some of their assets and converting them into SaaS applications on Azure. And that’s something that we will in fact have distribution agreements with.

And AppSource is a pretty major announcement for us because we essentially created for SaaS applications and infrastructure applications a way to distribute their applications through us and our channel. And I think it makes in fact our cloud more attractive to many of them because of that. So we look – I think going forward, you’ll look to see – or you’ll see us do much more of this with many other customers of ours.

The focus for us is in what I describe as this hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach when you think about the current approach, which is pretty unique to us. Overall, I believe this hyperscale plus hybrid architecturally helps us a lot with enterprise customers because we meet them where their realities are today and also the digital transformation needs going forward, so that’s one massive advantage we have.

And the way we track progress is to see how is our annuity growth of our server business, and how is our cloud growth. And if you look at this last quarter, our annuity grew double digits and our cloud grew triple digits. And that’s a pretty healthy growth rate, and that’s something that by design both in terms of the technical architecture as well as the traction we have in the marketplace and our sales efforts and so on are playing out well, and we are very bullish about that going forward.

The Transactional business is much more volatile because of the macro environment, IT budgets, and also the secular shift to the cloud. The question again that gets asked is about the cannibalization. But if you look at Boeing or you look at any of the other examples that I talk about when it comes to the cloud, our servers never did what these customers are now doing in our cloud. So at a fundamental long-term secular basis, we have new growth, new workloads, and that’s what we are focused on, and that’s a much bigger addressable market than anything our Transactional Server business had in the past.

[Amy E. Hood – Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President:]
The first thing really that I think Satya and I both focus on every quarter, every month, is how much of our business are we continuing to shift to annuity and specifically to the cloud. We structure all of our motions at this company, from how we engineer to how we do our go-to-markets to how we think about sales engagement to how we do our investments, fundamentally toward that long-term structural transition in the market.

In terms of server products and services, I tend to think of it as the all-up growth. It’s really about growing the cloud, growing the hybrid, and then whatever happens in the Transactional business happens.

And so to your question on Transactional performance, there were some deals that didn’t get done in Q3 that got done in Q4, and there were some deals done in Q4 on the Office side with large companies that I’m thrilled by. But at the same time, we still will focus on those deals moving to the cloud over time. And so this volatility that we are going to see because of macro and because of budget constraints, especially on Transactional, we will focus on because we expect excellent execution and have accountability to do that in the field. But our first priority, every time, is to make sure we are focused on annuity growth and digital transformation at our company, which is best done through that motion.

In terms of the sales motion they are absolutely incented more towards cloud versus Transactional going into this year.

I do believe that every conversation that we’re having with customers is cloud-led. That cloud-led conversation and making a plan for customers to best change and transform their own business certainly is a far more in-depth one than on occasion is required by long-time Transactional purchasers, especially in Office, as an example, because what we’re talking about now is really pivoting your business for the long term.

And so I’m sure there are examples where that has elongated the sales cycle, for good reason. But I would generally point back and say most of these are driven at the structural level, which is – structurally over time, on-premises Transactional business will move to the cloud or to a hybrid structure through an annuity revenue stream.
[END BY Amy E. Hood]

2.4 Meeting cloud needs of customers where they are

The position that we have taken is that we want to serve customers where they are and not assume very simplistically that the digital sovereignty needs of customers can be met out of a fewer data center approach. Because right now, given the secular trend to move to the cloud across all of the regulated industries across the globe, we think it’s wiser for us and our investors long term to be able to meet them where they are. And that’s what you see us. We are the only cloud that operates in China under Chinese law, the only cloud that operates in Germany under German law. And these are very critical competitive advantages to us.

And so we will track that, and we will be very demand driven. So in this case we’re not taking these positions of which regions to open and where to open them well in advance of our demand. If anything, I think our cycle times have significantly come down. So it will be demand-driven, but I don’t want to essentially put a cap because if the opportunity arises, and for us it’s a high ROI decision to open a new region, we will do so.

We have increased Windows 10 monthly active devices and are now at more than 350 million. This is the fastest adoption rate of any prior Windows release. While we are proud of these results, given changes to our phone plan, we changed how we will assess progress. Going forward, we will track progress by regularly reporting the growth of Windows 10 monthly active devices in addition to progress on three aspects of our Windows strategy:

3.1 Deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers

We continue to pursue our goal of moving people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. In two weeks, we will launch Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which takes a significant step forward in security. We are also extending Windows Hello to support apps and websites and delivering a range of new features like Windows Ink and updates to Microsoft Edge. We expect these advances will drive increased adoption of Windows 10, particularly in the enterprise, in the coming year. We already have strong traction, with over 96% of our enterprise customers piloting Windows 10.

As we grow our install base and engagement, we generate more opportunity for Microsoft and our ecosystem. Bing profitability continues to grow, with greater than 40% of the search revenue in June from Windows 10 devices. Bing PC query share in the United States approached 22% this quarter, not including volume from AOL and Yahoo!. The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users, with 8 billion questions asked to date.

We continue to drive growth in gaming by connecting fans on Xbox Live across Windows 10, iOS, and Android. Just this quarter we launched our Minecraft Realm subscription on Android and iOS. Overall engagement on Xbox Live is at record levels, with more than 49 million monthly active users, up 33% year over year. At E3 we announced our biggest lineup of exclusive games ever for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. And we announced Xbox Play Anywhere titles, where gamers can buy a game once and play it on both their Windows 10 PC and Xbox One. We also announced two new members of the Xbox One console family, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.

The Windows Store continues to grow, with new universal Windows apps like Bank of America, Roku, SiriusXM, Instagram, Facebook, Wine, Hulu, and popular PC games like Quantum Break.

3.3 Innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

Our hardware partners are embracing the new personal computing vision, with over 1,500 new devices designed to take advantage of Windows 10 innovations like Touch, Pen, Hello, and better performance and power efficiency.

Microsoft’s family of Surface devices continues to drive category growth, and we are reaching more commercial customers of all sizes with the support of our channel partners. We recently announced new Surface enterprise initiatives with IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton to enable more customer segments. Also in the past year, we grew our commercial Surface partner channel from over 150 to over 10,000.

Lastly this quarter, more and more developers and enterprise customers got to experience two entirely new device categories from Microsoft Surface Hub and Microsoft HoloLens. While we are still in the early days of both of these devices, we are seeing great traction with both enterprise customers and developers, making us optimistic about future growth.

May 19, 2016:

With OpenStack in tow you’ll go far — be it your house, your bank, your city or your car.

Just look at all of the exciting places we’re going:

From the phone in your pocket

The telecom industry is undergoing a massive shift, away from hundreds of proprietary devices in thousands of central offices accumulated over decades, to a much more efficient and flexible software plus commodity hardware approach. While some carriers like AT&T have already begun routing traffic from the 4G networks over OpenStack powered clouds to millions of cellphone users, the major wave of adoption is coming with the move to 5G, including plans from AT&T, Telefonica, SK Telekom, and Verizon.

We are on the cusp of a revolution that will completely re-imagine what it means to provide services in the trillion dollar telecom industry, with billions of connected devices riding on OpenStack-powered infrastructure in just a few years.

To the living room socket

The titans of TV like Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner Cable all rely on OpenStack to bring the latest entertainment to our homes efficiently, and innovators like DigitalFilm Tree are producing that content faster than ever thanks to cloud-based production workflows.

Your car, too, will get smart

Speaking of going places, back here on earth many of the world’s top automakers, such as BMW and the Volkswagen group, which includes Audi, Lamborghini, and even Bentley, are designing the future of transportation using OpenStack and big data. The hottest trends to watch in the auto world are electric zero emissions cars and self-driving cars. Like the “smart city” mentioned above, a proliferation of sensors plus connectivity call for distributed systems to bring it all together, creating a huge opportunity for OpenStack.

And your bank will take part

Money moves faster than ever, with digital payments from startups and established players alike competing for consumer attention. Against this backdrop of enormous market change, banks must meet an increasingly rigid set of regulatory rules, not to mention growing security threats. To empower their developers to innovate while staying diligent on regs and security, financial leaders like PayPal, FICO, TD Bank, American Express, and Visa are adopting OpenStack.

Your city must keep the pace

Powering the world’s cities is a complex task and here OpenStack is again driving automation, this time in the energy sector. State Grid Corporation, the world’s largest electric utility, serves over 120 million customers in China while relying on OpenStack in production.

Looking to the future, cities will be transformed by the proliferation of fast networks combined with cheap sensors. Unlocking the power of this mix are distributed systems, including OpenStack, to process, store, and move data. Case in point: tcpcloud in Prague is helping introduce “smart city” technology by utilizing inexpensive Raspberry Pis embedded in street poles, backed by a distributed system based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. These systems give city planners insight into traffic flows of both pedestrians and cars, and even measure weather quality. By routing not just packets but people, cities are literally load balancing their way to lower congestion and pollution.

From inner to outer space

The greatest medical breakthroughs of the next decade will come from analyzing massive data sets, thanks to the proliferation of distributed systems that put supercomputer power into the hands of every scientist. And OpenStack has a huge role to play empowering researchers all over the globe: from Melbourne to Madrid, Chicago to Chennai, or Berkeley to Beijing, everywhere you look you’ll find OpenStack.

To explore this world, I recently visited the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin where I toured a facility that houses one of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, code named “Stampede

But what really got me excited about the future was the sight of two large OpenStack clusters: one called Chameleon, and the newest addition, Jetstream, which put the power of more than 1,000 nodes and more than 15,000 cores into the hands of scientists at 350 universities. In fact, the Chameleon cloud was recently used in a class at the University of Arizona by students looking to discover exoplanets. Perhaps the next Neil deGrasse Tyson is out there using OpenStack to find a planet to explore for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

Where should we go next?

Mark Collier is OpenStack co-founder, and currently the OpenStack Foundation COO. This article was first published in Superuser Magazine, distributed at the Austin Summit.

May 9, 2016:

THE 451 TAKE OpenStack mindshare continues to grow for enterprises interested in deploying cloud-native applications in greenfield private cloud environments. However, its appeal is limited for legacy applications and enterprises sold on hyperscale multi-tenant cloud providers like AWS and Azure. There are several marquee enterprises with OpenStack as the central component of cloud transformations, but many are still leery of the perceived complexity of configuring, deploying and maintaining OpenStack-based architectures. Over the last few releases, processes for installation and upgrades, tooling, and API standardization across projects have improved as operators have become more vocal during the requirements phase. Community membership continues to grow on a global basis, and the supporting organization also depicts a similar geographic trend.

… Horizontal scaling of Nova is much improved, based on input from CERN and Rackspace. CERN, an early OpenStack adopter, demonstrated the ability for the open source platform to scale – it now has 165,000 cores running OpenStack. However, Walmart, PayPal and eBay are operating larger OpenStack environments.

May 18, 2015:

Walmart‘s Cloud Journey by Amandeep Singh Juneja
Sr. Director, Cloud Engineering and Operations, WalmartLabs: Introduction to World’s largest retailer and its journey to build a large private Cloud.

Amandeep Singh Juneja is Senior Director for Cloud Operations and Engineering at WalmartLabs. In his current role, Amandeep is responsible for the build out of elastic cloud used by various Walmart Ecommerce properties. Prior to his current role at Walmart Labs, Amandeep has held various leadership roles at HP, WebOS (Palm) and eBay.

May 19, 2015:

Subbu is the Chief Engineer of cloud at eBay Inc. His team builds and operates a multi-tenant geographically distributed OpenStack based private cloud. This cloud now serves 100% of PayPal web and mid tier workloads, significant parts of eBay front end and services, and thousands of users for their dev/test activities.

May 18, 2015:

Graeme cut his teeth in the financial services consulting industry by designing and developing real-time Trading, Risk and Clearing applications. He then joined NatWest Markets and J.P. Morgan in executive level roles within the Equity Derivatives business lines.

Graeme then moved to a Silicon Valley Startup to expand his skillset as V.P. of Engineering at Application Networks. His responsibility extended to Strategy, Innovation, Product Development, Release Management and Support to some of the biggest names in the Financial Services Sector.

For the last 10 years, he has held Divisional CIO roles at Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, both of which saw him responsible for Credit, Securitized and Emerging Market businesses.

Graeme moved back to a V.P. of Engineering role at TD Bank Group several years ago. He currently oversees all Infrastructure Innovation — everything form Mobile and Desktop to Database, Middleware and Cloud. His focus is on the transformational: software development techniques, infrastructure design patterns, and DevOps processes.

North American retail banking outfit TD Bank is using OpenStack among a range of other open source cloud technologies to help catalyse cultural change as it looks to reduce costs and technology redundancy, explained TD Bank group vice president of engineering Graeme Peacock.

TD Bank is one of Canada’s largest retail banks, having divested many of its investment banking divisions over the past ten years while buying up smaller American retail banks in a bid to offer cross-border banking services.

Peacock, who was speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver this week, said TD Bank is in the midst of a massive transition in how it procures, deploys and consumes technology. The bank aims to have about 80 per cent of its 4,000 application estate moved over to the cloud over the next five years.

“If they can’t build it on cloud they need to get my permission to obtain a physical server. Which is pretty hard to get,” he said.

But the company’s legacy of acquisition over the past decade has shaped the evolution of both the technology and systems in place at the bank as well as the IT culture and the way those systems and technologies are managed.

“Growing from acquisition means we’ve developed a very project-based culture, and you’re making a lot of transactional decisions within those projects. There are consequences to growing through acquisition – TD is very vendor-centric,” he explained.

“There are a lot of vendors here and I’m fairly certain we’ve bought at least one of everything you’ve ever made. That’s led to the landscape that we’ve had, which has lots of customisation. It’s very expensive and there is little reused.”

Peacock said much of what the bank wants to do is fairly straightforward: moving off highly customised expensive equipment and services, and moving on to more open, standardised commodity platforms, and OpenStack is but one infrastructure-centric tool helping the bank deliver on that goal (it’s using it to stand up an internal private cloud). But the company also has to deal with other aspects a recent string of acquisition has left at the bank, including the fact that its development teams are still quite siloed, in order to reach its goals.

In order to standardise and reduce the number of services the firm’s developers use, the bank created an engineering centre in Manhattan and elected a team of engineers and developers (currently numbering 30, but will hit roughly 50 by the end of the year) spread between Toronto and New York City, all focused on helping it embrace a cloud-first, slimmed-down application landscape.

The centre and the central engineering team work with other development teams and infrastructure specialists across the bank, collecting feedback through fortnightly Q&As and feeding that back into the solutions being developed and the platforms being procured. Solving developer team fragmentation will ultimately help the bank move forward on this new path sustainably, he explained.

“When your developer community is so siloed you don’t end up adopting standards… you end up with 27 versions of Softcat. Which we have, by the way,” he said.

“This is a big undertaking, and one that has to be continuous. Business lines also have to move with us to decompose those applications and help deliver against those commitments,” he added.

While OpenStack may have been conceived as an open source multi-tenant IaaS, its future success will mainly come from hosted and on-premises private cloud deployments. Yes, there are many pockets of success with regional or vertical-focused public clouds based on OpenStack, but none with the scale of AWS or the growth of Microsoft Azure. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shuttered its OpenStack Helion-based public cloud, and Rackspace shifted engineering resources away from its own public cloud. Rackspace, the service provider with the largest share of OpenStack-related revenue, says its private cloud is growing in the ‘high double digits.’ Currently, 56% of OpenStack’s service-provider revenue total is public cloud-based, but we expect private cloud will account for a larger portion over the next few years.

October 21, 2015:

Over the past several years, HP has built its strategy on the idea that a hybrid infrastructure is the future of enterprise IT. In doing so, we have committed to helping our customers seamlessly manage their business across traditional IT and private, managed or public cloud environments, allowing them to optimize their infrastructure for each application’s unique requirements.

The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly. Today, our customers are consistently telling us that in order to meet their full spectrum of needs, they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud, as well as access to SaaS applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads. In addition, they are pushing for delivery of these solutions faster than ever before.

With these customer needs in mind, we have made the decision to double-down on our private and managed cloud capabilities. For cloud-enabling software and solutions, we will continue to innovate and invest in our HP Helion OpenStack®platform. HP Helion OpenStack® has seen strong customer adoption and now runs our industry leading private cloud solution, HP Helion CloudSystem, which continues to deliver strong double-digit revenue growth and win enterprise customers. On the cloud services side, we will focus our resources on our Managed and Virtual Private Cloud offerings. These offerings will continue to expand, and we will have some very exciting announcements on these fronts in the coming weeks.

Public cloud is also an important part of our customers’ hybrid cloud strategy, and our customers are telling us that the lines between all the different cloud manifestations are blurring. Customers tell us that they want the ability to bring together multiple cloud environments under a flexible and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud model. In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers.

Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on January 31, 2016. As we have before, we will help our customers design, build and run the best cloud environments suited to their needs – based on their workloads and their business and industry requirements.

To support this new model, we will continue to aggressively grow our partner ecosystem and integrate different public cloud environments. To enable this flexibility, we are helping customers build cloud-portable applications based on HP Helion OpenStack® and the HP Helion Development Platform. In Europe, we are leading the Cloud28+ initiative that is bringing together commercial and public sector IT vendors and EU regulators to develop common cloud service offerings across 28 different countries.

For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus, and we have worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure. We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure.

All of these are key elements in helping our customers transform into a hybrid, multi-cloud IT world. We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies.

December 1, 2015:

London, U.K. – December 1, 2015 – Today at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover, HPE and Microsoft Corp. announced new innovation in Hybrid Cloud computing through Microsoft Azure, HPE infrastructure and services, and new program offerings. The extended partnership appoints Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud partner for HPE customers while HPE will serve as a preferred partner in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud offerings.

“Hewlett Packard Enterprise is committed to helping businesses transform to hybrid cloud environments in order to drive growth and value,” said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Public cloud services, like those Azure provides, are an important aspect of a hybrid cloud strategy and Microsoft Azure blends perfectly with HPE solutions to deliver what our customers need most.”

The partnering companies will collaborate across engineering and services to integrate innovative compute platforms that help customers optimize their IT environment, leverage new consumption models and accelerate their business further, faster.

“Our mission to empower every organization on the planet is a driving force behind our broad partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that spans Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows 10,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “We are now extending our longstanding partnership by blending the power of Azure with HPE’s leading infrastructure, support and services to make the cloud more accessible to enterprises around the globe.”

Product Integration and Collaboration HPE and Microsoft are introducing the first hyper-converged system with true hybrid cloud capabilities, the HPE Hyper-Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard. Bringing together industry leading HPE ProLiant technology and Microsoft Azure innovation, the jointly engineered solution brings Azure services to customers’ datacenters, empowering users to choose where and how they want to leverage the cloud. An Azure management portal enables business users to self-deploy Windows and Linux workloads, while ensuring IT has central oversight. Azure services provide reliable backup and disaster recovery, and with HPE OneView for Microsoft System Center, customers get an integrated management experience across all system components. HPE offers hardware and software support, installation and startup services to customers to speed deployment to just a matter of hours, lower risk and decrease total cost of ownership. The CS 250 is available to order today.

As part of the expanded partnership, HPE will enable Azure consumption and services on every HPE server, which allows customers to rapidly realize the benefits of hybrid cloud.

Extended Support and Services to Simplify Cloud

HPE and Microsoft will create HPE Azure Centers of Excellence in Palo Alto, Calif. and Houston, Texas, to ensure customers have a seamless hybrid cloud experience when leveraging Azure across HPE infrastructure, software and services. Through the work at these centers, both companies will invest in continuing advancements in Hybrid IT and Composable Infrastructure.

Because Azure is a preferred provider of public cloud for HPE customers, HPE also plans to certify an additional 5,000 Azure Cloud Architects through its Global Services Practice. This will extend its Enterprise Services offerings to bring customers an open, agile hybrid cloud with improved security that integrates with Azure.

Partner Program Collaboration

Microsoft will join the HPE Composable Infrastructure Partner Program to accelerate innovation for the next-generation infrastructure and advance the automation and integration of Microsoft System Center and HPE OneView orchestration tools with today’s infrastructure.

As of the Mitaka release, two new gold members were added: UnitedStack and EasyStack, both from China. Other service providers and vendors shared their customer momentum and product updates with 451 Research during the summit. Among the highlights are: 

AT&T has cobbled together a DevOps team from 67 different organizations, in order to transform into a software company. 

All of GoDaddy’s new servers are going into its OpenStack environment. It is also using the Ironic (bare metal) project and exploring containers on OpenStack. 

SwiftStack built a commercial product with an AWS-like consumption model using the Swift (object storage) project. It now has over 60 customers, including eBay, PayPal, Burton Snowboards and Ancestry.com. 

OVH is based in France and operates a predominately pan-Europe public cloud. It added Nova compute in 2014, and currently has 75PB on Swift storage. 

Unitas Global says OpenStack-related enterprise engagements are a large part of its 100% Y/Y growth. While it does not contribute code, it is helping to develop operational efficiencies and working with Canonical to deploy ‘vanilla’ OpenStack using Juju charms. Tableau Software is a client. 

DreamHost is operating an OpenStack public cloud, DreamCompute, and is a supporter of the Astara (network orchestration) project. It claims 2,000 customers for DreamCompute and 10,000 customers for its object storage product. 

Platform9 is a unique OpenStack in SaaS startup with 20 paying customers. Clients bring their own hardware, and the software provides the management functions and takes care of patching and upgrades. 

AppFormix is a software startup focused on cloud operators and application developers that has formed a licensing agreement with Rackspace. Its analytics and capacity-planning dashboard software will now be deployed on Rackspace’s OpenStack private cloud. The software also works with Azure and AWS. 

Tesora is leveraging the Trove project to offer DBaaS. The vendor built a plug-in for Mirantis’ Fuel installer. The collaboration claims to make commercial, open source relational and NoSQL databases easier for administrators to deploy.

April 25, 2016:

OpenStack + AT&T Innovation = AT&T Integrated Cloud.

AT&T’s network has experienced enormous growth in traffic in the last several years and the trend continues unabated. Our software defined network initiative addresses the escalating traffic demands and brings greater agility and velocity to delivering features to end customers. The underlying fabric of this software defined network is AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC).

Sorabh Saxena, AT&T’s SVP of Software Development & Engineering, will share several use cases that will highlight a multi-dimensional strategy for delivering an enterprise & service provider scale cloud. The use cases will illustrate OpenStack as the foundational element of AIC, AT&T solutions that complement it, and how it’s integrated with the larger AT&T ecosystem.

As the Senior Vice President of Software Development and Engineering at AT&T, Sorabh Saxena is leading AT&T’s transformation to a software-based company. Towards that goal, he is leading the development of platforms that include AT&T’s Integrated Cloud (AIC), API, Data, and Business Functions. Additionally, he manages delivery and production support of AT&T’s software defined network.

Sorabh and his organization are also responsible for technology solutions and architecture for all IT projects, AT&T Operation Support Systems and software driven business transformation programs that are positioning AT&T to be a digital first, integrated communications company with a best in class cost structure. Sorabh is also championing a cultural shift with a focus on workforce development and software & technology skills development.

Through Sorabh and his team’s efforts associated with AIC, AT&T is implementing an industry leading, highly complex and massively scaled OpenStack cloud. He is an advocate of OpenStack and his organization contributes content to the community that represents the needs of large enterprises and communication services providers.

AUSTIN, Texas — The OpenStack Austin Summit kicked off day one by awarding the Superuser Award to AT&T.

NTT, winners of the Tokyo edition, passed the baton onstage to the crew from AT&T.

AT&T is a legacy telco which is transforming itself by adopting virtual infrastructure and a software defined networking focus in order to compete in the market and create value for customers in the next five years and beyond. They have almost too many OpenStack accomplishments to list–read their full application here.

Sorabh Saxena gives a snapshot of AT&Ts OpenStack projects during the keynote.

The OpenStack Foundation launched the Superuser Awards to recognize, support and celebrate teams of end-users and operators that use OpenStack to meaningfully improve their businesses while contributing back to the community.

The legacy telecom is in the top 20 percent for upstream contributions with plans to increase this significantly in 2016.

It’s time for the community to determine the winner of the Superuser Award to be presented at the OpenStack Austin Summit. Based on the nominations received, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board conducted the first round of judging and narrowed the pool to four finalists.

Now, it’s your turn.

The team from AT&T is one of the four finalists. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and cast your vote before the deadline, Friday, April 8 at 11:59 p.m.Pacific Daylight Time. Voting is limited to one ballot per person.

How has OpenStack transformed your business?

AT&T is a legacy telco which is transforming itself by adopting virtual infrastructure and a software defined networking focus in order to compete in the market and create value for customers in the next five years and beyond.

Virtualization and virtual network functions (VNFs) are of critical importance to the Telecom industry to address growth and agility. AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Industry Whitepaper released in 2013 outlines the need as well as direction.

AT&T chose OpenStack as the core foundation of their cloud and virtualization strategy

OpenStack has reinforced AT&T’s open source strategy and strengthened our dedication to the community as we actively promote and invest resources in OpenStack

AT&T is committing staff and resources to drive the vision and innovation in the OpenStack and OPNFV communities to help drive OpenStack as the default cloud orchestrator for the Telecom industry

AT&T as a founding member of the ETSI ISG network functions virtualization (NFV) helped drive OpenStack as the cloud orchestrator in the NFV platform framework. OpenStack was positioned as the VIM – Virtual Infrastructure Manager. This accelerated the convergence of the Telco industry onto OpenStack.

OpenStack serves as a critical foundation for AT&T’s software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV future and we take pride in the following:

AT&T has deployed 70+ OpenStack (Juno & Kilo based) clouds globally, which are currently operational. Of the 70+ clouds 57 are production application and network clouds.

AT&T plans 90% growth, going to 100+ production application and network clouds by the end of 2016.

AT&T connects more than 14 million wireless customers via virtualized networks, with significant subscriber cut-over planned again in 2016

AT&T controls 5.7% of our network resources (29 Telco production grade VNFs) with OpenStack, with plans to reach 30% by the end of 2016 and 75% by 2020.

AT&T trained more than 100 staff in OpenStack in 2015

AT&T plans to expand to expand its community team of 50+ employees in 2016 As the chosen cloud platform OpenStack enabled AT&T in the following SDN and NFV related initiatives:

Our recently announced 5G field trials in Austin

Re-launch of unlimited data to mobility customers

Launch of AT&T Collaborate a next generation communication tool for enterprise

Provisioning of a Network on Demand platform to more than 500 enterprise customers

Connected Car and MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator)

Mobile Call Recording

Internally we are virtualizing our control services like DNS, NAT, NTP, DHCP, radius, firewalls, load balancers and probes for fault and performance management.

Since 2012, AT&T has developed all of our significant new applications in a cloud native fashion hosted on OpenStack. We also architected OpenStack to support legacy apps.

OpenStack currently resides on over 15,000 VMs worldwide, with the expectation of further, significant growth coming in 2016-17

AT&T’s OpenStack integrated Orchestration framework has resulted in a 75% reduction in turnaround time for requests for virtual resources

AT&T Plans to move 80% of our Legacy IT into the OpenStack based virtualized cloud environment within coming years

Uniform set of APIs exposed by OpenStack allows AT&T business units to leverage a “develop-once-run-everywhere” set of tools OpenStack helps AT&T’s strategy to begin to adopt best of the breed solutions at five 9’s of reliability for:

NFV

Internet-scale storage service

SDN

Putting all AT&T’s workloads on one common platform Deployment Automation: OpenStack modules have enabled AT&T to cost-effectively manage the OpenStack configuration in an automated, holistic fashion.

Using OpenStack Heat, AT&T pushed rolling updates and incremental changes across 70+ OpenStack clouds. Doing it manually would be take many more people and a much longer schedule.

Using OpenStack Fuel as a pivotal component in its cloud deployments AT&T accelerates the otherwise consuming, complex, and error-prone process of deploying, testing, and maintaining various configuration flavors of OpenStack at scale. AT&T was a major contributor towards Fuel 7.0 and Fuel 8.0 requirements. OpenStack has been a pivotal driver of AT&T’s overall culture shift. AT&T as an organization is in the midst of a massive culture shift from a Legacy Telco to a company where new skills, techniques and solutions are embraced.

OpenStack has been a key driver of this transformation in the following ways:

AT&T is now building 50 percent of all software on open source technologies

Allowing for the adoption of a dev ops model that creates a more unified team working towards a better end product

Development transitioned from a waterfall to cloud-native CICD methodologies

Developers continue to support OpenStack and make their applications cloud-native whenever possible.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to the OpenStack community?

AT&T was the first U.S. telecom service provider to sign up for and adopt the then early stage NASA-spawned OpenStack cloud initiative, back in 2011.

AT&T has been an active OpenStack contributor since the Bexar release.

AT&T has been a Platinum Member of the OpenStack Foundation since its origins in 2012 after helping to create its bylaws.

Toby Ford, AVP AT&T Cloud Technology has provided vision, technology leadership, and innovation to OpenStack ecosystem as an OpenStack Foundation board member since late 2012.

AT&T is founding member of ETSI, and OPNFV.

AT&T has invested in building an OpenStack upstream contribution team with 25 current employees and a target for 50+ employees by the end of 2016.

During the early years of OpenStack, AT&T brought many important use-cases to the community. AT&T worked towards solving those use-cases by leveraging various OpenStack modules, in turn encouraging other enterprises to have confidence in the young ecosystem.

AT&T drove these following Telco-grade blueprint contributions to past releases of OpenStack:

AT&T is proud to drive OpenStack adoption by sharing knowledge back to the OpenStack community in the form of these summit sessions at the upcoming Austin summit:

Telco Cloud Requirements: What VNFs Are Asking For

Using a Service VM as an IPv6 vRouter

Service Function Chaining

Technology Analysis Perspective

Deploying Lots of Teeny Tiny Telco Clouds

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about OpenStack At Scale

Valet: Holistic Data Center Optimization for OpenStack

Gluon: An Enabler for NFV

Among the Cloud: Open Source NFV + SDN Deployment

AT&T: Driving Enterprise Workloads on KVM and vCenter using OpenStack as the Unified Control Plane

Striving for High-Performance NFV Grid on OpenStack. Why you, and every OpenStack community member should be excited about it

OpenStack at Carrier Scale

AT&T is the “first to market” with deployment of OpenStack supported carrier-grade Virtual Network Functions. We provide the community with integral data, information, and first-hand knowledge on the trials and tribulations experienced deploying NFV technology.

AT&T ranks in the top 20 percent of all companies in terms of upstream contribution (code, documentation, blueprints), with plans to increase this significantly in 2016.

Commits: 1200+

Lines of Code: 116,566

Change Requests: 618

Patch Sets: 1490

Draft Blueprints: 76

Completed Blueprints: 30

Filed Bugs: 350

Resolved Bugs: 250

What is the scale of the OpenStack deployment?

AT&T’s OpenStack based AIC is deployed at 70+ sites across the world. Of the 70+ 57 are production app and network clouds.

AT&T plans 90% growth, going to 100+ production app and network clouds by end of 2016.

AT&T connects more than 14 million of the 134.5 million wireless customers via virtualized networks with significant subscriber cutover planned again in 2016

AT&T controls 5.7% of our network resources (29 Telco production grade VNF) with a goal of high 80s by end of 2016) on OpenStack.

Production workloads also include AT&T’s Connected Car, Network on Demand, and AT&T Collaborate among many more.

How is this team innovating with OpenStack?

AT&T and AT&T Labs are leveraging OpenStack to innovate with Containers and NFV technology.

Containers are a key part of AT&Ts Cloud Native Architecture. AT&T chairs the Open Container Initiative (OCI) to drive the standardization around container formats.

AT&T is leading the effort to improve Nova and Neutron’s interface to SDN controllers.

Margaret Chiosi, an early design collaborator to Neutron, ETSI NFV, now serves as President of OPNFV. AT&T is utilizing its position with OPNFV to help shape the future of OpenStack / NFV. OpenStack has enabled AT&T to innovate extensively.

The following recent unique workloads would not be possible without the SDN and NFV capabilities which OpenStack enables: * Our recent announcements of 5G field trials in Austin * Re-launch of unlimited data to mobility customers * Launch of AT&T Collaborate * Network on Demand platform to more than 500 enterprise customers * Connected Car and MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) * Mobile Call Recording New services by AT&T Entertainment Group (DirecTV) that would use OpenStack based cloud infrastructure in coming years: * NFL Sunday Ticket with up to 8 simultaneous games * DirecTV Streaming Service Without Need For satellite dish

In summary – the innovation with OpenStack is not just our unique workloads, but also to support them together under the same framework, management systems, development/test, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation toolset(s).

Swisscom has one of the largest in-production industry standard Platform as a Service built on OpenStack. Their offering is focused on providing an enterprise-grade PaaS environment to customers worldwide and with various delivery models based on Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. Swisscom embarked early on the OpenStack journey to deploy their app cloud partnering with Red Hat, Cloud Foundry, and PLUMgrid. With services such as MongoDB, MariaDB, RabbitMQ, ELK, and an object storage, the PaaS cloud offers what developers need to get started right away. Join this panel for take-away lessons on Swisscom’s journey, the technologies, partnerships, and developers who are building apps everyday on Swisscom’s OpenStack cloud.

Swisscom has one of the largest in-production industry standard platform-as-a-service built on OpenStack.

Their offering focuses on providing an enterprise-grade PaaS environment to customers worldwide and with various delivery models based on Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, embarked early on the OpenStack journey to deploy their app cloud partnering with Red Hat, Cloud Foundry and PLUMgrid.

Superuser interviewed Marcel Härry, chief architect, PaaS at Swisscom and member of theTechnical Advisory Board of the Cloud Foundry Foundation to find out more.

How are you using OpenStack?

OpenStack has allowed us to rapidly develop and deploy our Cloud Foundry-based PaaS offering, as well as to rapidly develop new features within SDN and containers. OpenStack is the true enabler for rapid development and delivery.

An example: after half a year from the initial design and setup, we already delivered two production instances of our PaaS offering built on multiple OpenStack installations on different sites. Today we are already running multiple production deployments for high-profile customers, who further develop their SaaS offerings using our platform. Additionally, we are providing the infrastructure for numerous lab and development instances. These environments allow us to harden and stabilize new features while maintaining a rapid pace of innovation, while still ensuring a solid environment.

We are running numerous OpenStack stacks, all limited – by design – to a single region, and single availability zone. Their size ranges from a handful of compute nodes, to multiple dozens of compute nodes, scaled based on the needs of the specific workloads. Our intention is not to build overly large deployments, but rather to build multiple smaller stacks, hosting workloads that can be migrated between environments. These stacks are hosting thousands of VMs, which in turn are hosting tens of thousands of containers to run production applications or service instances for our customers.

What kinds of applications or workloads are you currently running on OpenStack?

We’ve been using OpenStack for almost three years now as our infrastructure orchestrator. Swisscom built its Elastic Cloud on top of OpenStack. On top of this we run Swisscom’s Application Cloud, or PaaS, built on Cloud Foundry with PLUMgrid as the SDN layer. Together, the company’s clouds deliver IaaS to IT architects, SaaS to end users and PaaS to app developers among other services and applications. We mainly run our PaaS/Cloud Foundry environment on OpenStack as well as the correlated managed services (i.e. a kind of DBaaS, Message Service aaS etc.) which are running themselves in Docker containers.

What challenges have you faced in your organization regarding OpenStack, and how did you overcome them?

The learning curve for OpenStack is pretty steep. When we started three years ago almost no reference architectures were available, especially none with enterprise-grade requirements such as dual-site, high availability (HA) capabilities on various levels and so forth. In addition, we went directly into the SDN, SDS levels of implementation which was a big, but very successful step at the end of the day.

What were your major milestones?

Swisscom’s go-live for its first beta environment was in spring of 2014, go live for an internal development (at Swisscom) was spring of 2015, and the go-live for its public Cloud Foundry environment fully hosted on OpenStack was in the fall of 2015. The go-live date for enterprise-grade and business-critical workloads on top of our stack from various multinational companies in verticals like finance or industry is spring, 2016, and Swisscom recently announced Swiss Re as one of its first large enterprise cloud customers.

What have been the biggest benefits to your organization as a result of using OpenStack?

Pluggability and multi-vendor interoperability (for instance with SDN like PLUMgrid or SDS like ScaleIO) to avoid vendor lock in and create a seamless system. OpenStack enabled Swisscom to experiment with deployments utilizing a DevOps model and environment to deploy and develop applications faster. It simplified the move from PoC to production environments and enabled us to easily scale out services utilizing a distributed cluster-based architecture.

What advice do you have for companies considering a move to OpenStack?

It’s hard in the beginning but it’s really worth it. Be wise when you select your partners and vendors, this will help you to be online in a very short amount of time. Think about driving your internal organization towards a dev-ops model to be ready for the first deployments, as well as enabling your firm to change deployment models (e.g. going cloud-native) for your workloads when needed.

How do you participate in the community?

This year’s Austin event was our second OpenStack Summit where we provided insights into our deployment and architecture, contributing back to the community in terms of best practices, as well as providing real-world production use-cases. Furthermore, we directly contribute patches and improvements to various OpenStack projects. Some of these patches have already been accepted, while a few are in the pipeline to be further polished for publishing. Additionally, we are working very closely together with our vendors – RedHat, EMC, ClusterHQ/Flocker, PLUMgrid as well as the Cloud Foundry Foundation – and work together to further improve their integration and stability within the OpenStack project. For example, we worked closely together with Flocker for their cinder-based driver to orchestrate persistency among containers. Furthermore, we have provided many bug reports through our vendors and have worked together with them on fixes which then have made their way back into the OpenStack community.

What’s next?

We have a perfect solution for non-persistent container workloads for our customers. We are constantly evolving this product and are working especially hard to meet the enterprise- and finance-verticals requirements when it comes to the infrastructure orchestration of OpenStack.

Härry spoke about OpenStack in production at the recent Austin Summit, along with Pere Monclus of PLUMgrid, Chip Childers of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Chris Wright of Red Hat and analyst Rosalyn Roseboro.

BEIJING, May 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — In 2015, the Chinese IT superpower Lenovo chose EasyStack to build an OpenStack-based enterprise cloud platform to carry out their “Internet Strategy”. In six months, this platform has evolved into an enterprise-level OpenStack production environment of over 3000 cores with data growth peaking at 10TB/day. It is expected that by the end of 2016, 20% of the IT system will be migrated onto the Cloud.

OpenStack is the foundation for Cloud, and perhaps has matured in the overseas market. In China, OpenStack practices worthy of noticing often come from the relatively new category of Internet Companies. Though it has long been marketed as “enterprise-ready”, traditional industries still tend to hold back towards OpenStack. This article aims to turn this perception around by presenting an OpenStack practice from the Chinese IT Superpower Lenovo, detailing their journey of transformation in both the technology and business realms to a private cloud built upon OpenStack. Although OpenStack will still be largely a carrier for internet businesses, Lenovo plans to migrate 20% of its IT system onto the cloud before the end of 2016 – taking a much applauded step forward.

Be it the traditional PC or the cellphone, technology’s evolving fast amidst this move towards mobile and social networking, and the competition’s fierce. In response to rapidly changing market dynamics, the Lenovo Group made the move of going from being product-oriented to a user-oriented strategy that can only be supported by an agile, flexible and scalable enterprise-level cloud platform capable of rapid iterations. After thorough consideration and careful evaluation, Lenovo chose OpenStack as the basis for their enterprise cloud platform to carry out this “Internet Strategy”. After six months of practice, this platform has evolved into an enterprise-level OpenStack production environment of over 3000 cores with data growth peaking at 10TB/day. It’s expected that 20% of the IT system will be migrated onto the Cloud by the end of 2016.

Transformation and Picking the Right Cloud

In the past, internal IT at Lenovo has always been channel- and key client-oriented, with a traditional architecture consisting of IBM Power, AIX, PowerVM, DB2 and more recently, VMware virtualization. In the move towards becoming an Internet Company, such traditional architecture was far from being able to support the user and business volume brought by the B2C model. Cost-wise, Lenovo’s large-scale deployment of commercial solutions were reliable but complex to scale and extremely expensive.

Also, this traditional IT architecture was inadequate in terms of operational efficiency, security and compliance and unable to support Lenovo’s transition towards eCommerce and mobile business. In 2015, Lenovo’s IT entered a stage of infrastructural re-vamp, in need of using a cloud computing platform to support new businesses.

To find the right makeup for the cloud platform, Lenovo performed meticulous analyses and comparisons on mainstream x86 virtualization technologies, private cloud platforms, and public cloud platforms. After evaluating stability, usability, openness and ecosystem vitality and comprehensiveness, Lenovo deemed the OpenStack cloud platform technology able to fulfill its enterprise needs and decided to use OpenStack as the infrastructural cloud platform supporting their constant businesses innovations.

Disaster recovery plans on virtual machines, cloud hard drives and databases were considered early on into the OpenStack architectural design to ensure prompt switch over when needed to maintain business availability.

To ensure high availability and improve the cloud platform’s system efficiency, Lenovo designed a physical architecture, and used capable servers with advanced configurations to make up the compute, storage network all-in-one, then using OpenStack to integrate into a single resource pool, placing compute nodes and storage nodes on the same physical node.

Two-way X3650 servers and four-way ThinkServer RQ940 server as backbones at the hardware layer. For every node there are five SSD hard drivers and 12 SAS hard drives to make up the storage module. SSD not only acts as the storage buffer, but also is the high performance storage resource pool, accessing the distributed storage through the VM to achieve high availability.

Lenovo had to resolve a number of problems and overcome numerous hurdles to elevate OpenStack to the enterprise-level.

Compute

Here, Lenovo utilized high-density virtual machine deployment. At the base is KVM virtualization technology, optimized in multiple way to maximize physical server performance, isolating CPU, Memory and other hardware resources under the compute-storage convergent architecture. The outcome is the ability to have over 50 VMs running smoothly and efficiently on every two-core CPU compute node.

In the cloud environment, it’s encouraged to achieve high availability through not hardware, but solutions. Yet still there are some traditional applications that hold certain requirements to a single host server. For such applications unable to achieve High Availability, Lenovo used Compute HA technology to achieve high availability on compute nodes, performing fault detection through various methods, migrating virtual machines on faulted physical machine to other available physical machines when needed. This entire process is automated, reducing as much as possible business disruptions caused by physical machine breakdowns.

Network

Network Isolation

Using different NIC, different switch or different VLAN to isolate various networks such as stand-alone OpenStack management networks, virtual production networks, storage networks, public networks, and PXE networks, so that interferences are avoided, increasing overall bandwidth and enabling better network control.

Multi-Public Network

Achieve network agility through multiple public networks to better manage security strategies. The Public Networks from Unicom, Telecom and at the office are some examples

Network and Optimization

Better integrate with the traditional data center network through the VLAN network model, then optimize its data package processing to achieve improved capability on network data pack process, bringing closer the virtual machine bandwidth to that of the physical network.

Dual Network Protocol Bundling and Multi Switch

Achieve high availability of physical networks through dual network protocol bundling to different switches.

Network Node HA

Achieve public network load balance, high availability and high performance through multiple network nodes, at which router-level Active/Standby methodology is used to achieve HA, which is ensured through independent network router monitoring services.

Storage

The Lenovo OpenStack Cloud Platform used Ceph as the unified storage backend, in which data storage for Glance image mirroring, Nova virtual machine system disc, and Cinder cloud hard drive are provided by Ceph RBD. Using Ceph’s Copy on Write function to revise OpenStack codes can deploy virtual machines within seconds.

With Ceph as the unified storage backend, its functionality is undoubtedly a key metric on whether the critical applications of an enterprise can be virtualized and cloud-ready. In a super-convergent deployment architecture where compute and storage run alongside each other, storage function optimization not only have to maximize storage capability, but also have to ensure the isolation between storage and compute resources to maintain system stability. For the IO stack below, Lenovo conducted bottom-up layer-by-layer optimization:

Leverage Solid State Disc as the Ceph OSD log to improve overall cluster IO functionality, to fulfill performance demands of critical businesses ( for example the eCommerce system’s database businesses, etc.) and achieve function-cost balance. SSD is known for its low power consumption, prompt response, high IOPS, and high throughput. In the Ceph log system, these are aligned to multithread access; using SSD to replace mechanical hard drives can fully unleash SSD’s trait of random access, rapid response and high IO throughput. Appropriately optimizing IO coordination strategy and further suit it to SSD and lower overall IO latency.

Purposeful Planning

Plan the number of Ceph OSD under the super-convergent node reasonably according to virtual machine density on the server, while assign in advance CPU and other memory resources. Cgroup, taskset and other tools can be used to perform resource isolation for QEMU-KVM and Ceph OSD

Parameter Tuning

Regarding parameter tuning for Ceph, performance can be effectively improved by fine-tuning parameters on FileStore’s default sequence, OSD’s OP thread and others. Additional tuning can be done through performing iteration test to find the most suitable parameter for the current hardware environment.

By employing exclusive low-latency fiber-optic cable, data can be simultaneously stored in local backup centers, and started asynchronously in long-distance centers, maximizing data security.

AD Integration

In addition, Lenovo has integrated its own business demands into the OpenStack enterprise cloud platform. As a mega company with tens of thousands of employees, AD activity logs are needed for authorization so that staffs won’t need to be individually set up user commands. Through customized development by part of the collaborator, Lenovo has successfully integrated AD functions into its OpenStack Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Overall Outcomes

Lenovo’s transformation towards being “internet-driven” was able to begin after the buildup of this OpenStack Enterprise Cloud Platform. eCommerce, Big Data and Analytics, IM, Online Mobile Phone Support and other internet based businesses, all supported by this cloud platform. Judging from feedback from the team, the Lenovo OpenStack Enterprise Cloud Platform is functioning as expected.

In the process of building up this OpenStack based enterprise cloud platform, Lenovo chose EasyStack, the leading Chinese OpenStack Company to provide professional implementation and consulting services, helping to build the initial platform, fostering a number of OpenStack experts. For Lenovo, community compatibility and continuous upgrade, as well as experiences in delivering services at the enterprise level are the main factors for consideration when choosing an OpenStack business partner.

Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp.’s Forum 2000 videos show the company’s vision for the Internet and computing products. They were released on June 22, 2000, 5-months into Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer’s tenure in the role. (Excerpts courtesy of Microsoft Corp. Source: Bloomberg)

Had they recognized the famous at that time “Steve Masters video’ their ‘Epic Fail’ retrospective would had been even more devastating: Steve Masters [Microsoft, March 24, 2009, but originally July 25, 2000]

Then a second video focussed very much on the essence which was not delivered even when the original .NET program was practically closed in February 2008. This was the so called “Steve Masters video” at the time of Microsoft .NET introduction in June-July 2000 and used to represent the important web services concept even afterwards.

Update as of Sept 20, 2012: Take note as well that CVP Jason Zander, who was up to now responsible for the delivery of Visual Studio 2012 described here, finally took his new role as CVP of development for Windows Azure. With this Azure has a triad structure with program management under CVP Scott Guthrie, and test and engineering systems under CVP Bharat Shah, all directly under the head of Server and Tools Business (STB), Satya Nadella. This is a structure quite similar to Steven Sinofsky’s Windows Business. It is also remarkable that Windows Embedded is also in the STB (since 2010), although not as directly as Azure. All this was first reported by ZDNet in August. The Windows Embedded position in STB you can grasp from an earlier post of mine: The future of Windows Embedded: from standalone devices to intelligent systems [March 9-28, 2012]. You can also find a “Who is Jason Zander?” update in the “Visual Studio 2012 Launch …” section of this very long post.END OF UPDATES

Made public on June 22, 2000 and becoming essentially dead on August 9, 2000, so having just 49 days of public lifetime, there was an inherent fate in the original .NET vision as it was a true cloud experience vision. Microsoft, however, wasn’t able to deliver that in terms of intended customer and consumer values widely advertised, “only” in terms of essential foundation technologies (but even that had been a tremendous achievement). So a non-cloud version of .NET had been delivered during not less than 8 years because of that. Even since 2008—with the evolving versions of Windows Azure cloud solution—the cloud experience had been so limited in .NET terms that we could not see any real, massive deliveries of the original .NET version. Not anymore!

How this happened? A conclusive summary put ahead: For me the morale of this, My .NET Services (alias Hailstorm) story is that without an extremely strong and capable, general constructor type leader, responsible for the delivery of the whole .NET vision (all along), a vision like the original .NET cannot succeed, if at all. With Ballmer’s August 9, 2000 decision not only the responsibilities were spread over all of Microsoft, but even the leadership was quite divided and diverse: Steve Ballmer, Bob Muglia, Eric Rudder, Sanjay Parthasarathy (who was initially under Rudder but essentially independent), … and—most importantly—Bill Gates himself, who as the CEO just months before had tremendous influence and respect throughout the organization, but was “clever enough” not to take any formal leadership responsibility by occupying a quite undefined “chief software architect” position.

For a well researched, more general analysis the best answer is in the Microsoft’s Lost Decade [Vanity Fair, Aug 15, 2012] which appeared in the August 2012 magazine issue as “How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline”. A highly recommended read as an addition to this story!

Here is the evidence of the original .NET vision as well as a brief retrospect of what happened behind the scene, then follows a section on more .NET background, as well as another section about the current Microsoft .NET as it is, then two sections for the new development platform which made possible the delivery of the original .NET vision:

The original .NET vision and its failed delivery with final correction started with Ray Ozzie

The original .NET vision and its failed delivery with final correction started with Ray Ozzie

Then a second video focussed very much on the essence which was not delivered even when the original .NET program was practically closed in February 2008. This was the so called “Steve Masters video” at the time of Microsoft .NET introduction in June-July 2000 and used to represent the important web services concept even afterwards.

To fully exploit the Internet as it’s going to look over the next few years (ie, Internet: the next generation), organisations must ‘expose themselves programmatically’ online, says Paul Maritz, the Microsoft group vice president of the platforms strategy and developer group.

With the help of a slick video featuring an accident-prone Steve Masters apparently of Seinfeld sitcom fame, Maritz last week argued the case for transforming the Internet into a services-rich platform. Such a platform, built on the back of Microsoft’s XML-based .NET (dot-net) environment, would let individuals use personalised services provided, or arranged, more or less instantly via online wireless devices. In Maritz’s scenario, it would be transparent to the individual if the personalised service required interaction with one or many organisations behind the scenes.

“We want to develop Web services that expose the functionality, the business logic, the value that you add across the Internet – expose it programmatically,” Maritz said. “When we really start to use the Internet as an information bus [it will] allow people to pull together the information they want and have more satisfying experiences.”

While the video showed Masters more as an efficient idiot rather than a satisfied customer, it did demonstrate the potential of an ‘information bus’ type Internet.

The plot went roughly like this: Masters is away from his home town when he is run down by a bicycle courier, and while lying on the footpath he uses his ‘smart phone’ to call his regular doctor’s office; the receptionist quizzes him about his injury (ankle); a GIS functionality within his smart phone signals his location and the receptionist identifies two appropriate orthopaedic specialists within limping distance. The receptionist’s system tells her that Masters’ health insurance cover is only 80 per cent at the nearest specialist while he’s 100 per cent covered for the slightly more distant doctor. She relays this to Masters and he chooses the closest doctor; the same receptionist checks the specialist’s schedule, finds she’s available and makes an appointment; the receptionist asks Masters if he wants his medical records (text and image) available online to the specialist; Masters says yes and the specialist is authorised for this access (voice or bio recognition possibly working in the backgound); the ins-urance payment pro-cess is initiated; he hobbles around the corner for treatment.

This all happened within a five-minute phone call. On crutches, Masters leaves the specialist’s office. He is run down by another bicycle courier. End video.

Imagine the systems integration hassles that would lie behind delivering the service as described above. Maritz claims that .Net products and services delivered by Microsoft and partners would ultimately make such work relatively easy (but remember .NET will take several years to roll out).

“His medical records information [could be] stored in a future .NET storage service and he controls access to that information. It’s an example of storing personal state, personal preferences, important information, out on the Internet, and then retaining control of it.”

“More importantly, what we saw was a number of Web service-enabled businesses, cooperating together programmatically across the Internet,” Maritz added. “There were the Web services that the receptionist was invoking and all of those were coming together in what to her looked like a single experience.”

According to Maritz, to enable such scenarios Microsoft is working on a ‘common programming model’ for the Next Generation Internet that is based on accepted, open, Internet standards, in particular the XML standard. This would let Microsoft and developers build to this model and call on the services it offers (see .NET white paper extract starting page 10 [not available anymore, therefore see the whole whitepaper text included below in the beginning of “More .NET background” section that is right in the middle of this post]). Other key technologies include the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) protocol (which Maritz described as “essentially the protocol that lets XML travel over the Internet”) which Microsoft submitted, jointly with IBM, to the World Wide Web Consortium.

“We believe that with this common programming model, and the set of standards laid down, we can start to build some very exciting and useful solutions,” he added.

Third-party .NET services are crucial to Microsoft’s strategy. To help ‘bootstrap’ the industry towards its vision, Microsoft will invest $US2 billion over the next three years to enable industry partners, independent developers and corporate IT developers to build Microsoft .NET services.

Early offerings to the development community include Visual Studio 7, or VisualStudio.NET, a prerelease version of which will be given to developers this month at Microsoft’s Professional Developers’ Conference in Orlando, Florida. The full Visual Studio.Net development suite won’t be available until 2002 or later. A version of Visual Studio 7 to be introduced next year will include some of the capabilities that developers need to build applications for the .Net platform, including support for the SOAP and enhanced XML support.

Visual Studio.Net falls under the Microsoft.Net services push, where developers build building blocks. The goals of the building blocks are to make applications easy to develop and integrate as well as to give developers the ability to project information to users when and where they need it, via whatever types of devices they require. Visual Studio is currently in a limited beta-testing phase.

New features in Visual Studio.Net include Drag-and-Drop Web Services development and a Web Form Designer. Drag-and-Drop Web Services enable developers to drag a task, such as calendaring, directly into a project so developers do not have to write reams of code for every program. The Web Form Designer is a graphical designer in which code or Web Services components can be dragged and dropped right into a project.

Microsoft also demonstrated a new aspect of BizTalk Server at Forum 2000, the BizTalk Application Designer. Built on top of Visio 2000, this feature enables developers to add business actions into Web services. The biggest benefit, according to BizTalk group manager Amit Mital, is that it enables business analysts to change the business processes without involving the developer.

Also new is a programming language dubbed C# (C Sharp). This is a language derived from C and C++ that provides a way for developers to build applications and components for the .Net platform, according to Tony Goodhew, Microsoft’s Visual C++ product manager.

Bob Trott contributed to this report. David Beynon was a guest of Microsoft at the Forum 2000 event, held in Redmond, Washington on June 22.

In his keynote address at the eighth Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2000, Paul Maritz, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft Corp., today announced the initial developer availability to PDC attendees of the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET for building, integrating and running next-generation, XML-based Web services. Visual Studio.NET, the latest version of the world’s most widely used development tools, provides native support for drag and drop development of Web services. Together, these two products provide developers with a high productivity, multilanguage environment to rapidly build, deliver and integrate Web services on the Microsoft .NET Platform.

“Delivering this software to developers today is an important milestone in helping developers build next-generation Internet software and services,” Maritz said. “By creating a unified platform where devices and services cooperate with each other, Microsoft is unleashing a new wave of developer opportunity and creativity that will help developers reach a new level of power and simplicity.”

At the heart of the .NET Platform is the .NET Framework, a high-productivity, multilanguage development and execution environment for building and running Web services with important features such as cross-language inheritance and debugging. The .NET Framework simplifies the creation of Web services by automatically handling many common programming tasks, regardless of programming language, reducing the amount of code developers must write and eliminating common sources of programming errors. The .NET Framework is the industry’s first development environment to natively support Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The .NET Framework incorporates advances to two key Microsoft development technologies: the Component Object Model, the most popular reusable software model in the world, and Active Server Pages, used by nearly 1 million Web developers.

Separately, Microsoft announced that 17 third-party programming languages, such as Perl and Python from ActiveState, will support the .NET Framework. The result is a new model of service-based development that offers faster time to market and more reliable, scalable software.

Microsoft also announced the .NET Compact Framework, which allows any device to emit or consume XML-based Web services. The .NET Compact Framework is a small footprint, CPU-independent implementation of the .NET Framework. Microsoft will provide a version for Windows® CE and other embedded operating systems, as well as for devices that do not require an operating system.

Visual Studio.NET is the most productive tool set for developers building Web services on the .NET Platform. Visual Studio.NET, which includes updates to the Visual Basic® and Visual C++® development systems, the Visual FoxPro® database development system, and a new language, C#, the recently announced dialect of C++, helps developers extend today’s development skills to tomorrow’s Web applications and Web services. Visual Studio.NET provides an easy-to-use, extensible integrated development environment (IDE) for the .NET Framework. Together, the new technologies introduced in the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET will enable millions of developers worldwide to quickly build and consume scalable, reliable and manageable Web services.

“We’re really excited about Visual Studio.NET,” said Bill Shea, software development manager for Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. “Enabling our software developers to rapidly build applications that integrate with the systems we have today, and that use Internet standards to communicate with any client system or device, will help us further enhance our service offerings and maintain our position as one of the world’s leading financial management and advisory companies.”

About Microsoft .NET

The Microsoft .NET Platform, announced June 22 at Forum 2000, is Microsoft’s initiative for creating the next generation of software, which melds computing and communications in a revolutionary way. This vision offers developers, businesses and consumers the ability to harness technology on their terms and with the tools they need to create truly distributed Web Services making information available any time, any place and on any device.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” ) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual FoxPro are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Microsoft Moves to Deliver on its Vision for the Next Generation Internet While Continuing Strong Focus on Core Businesses

…

Alignment for the Future — Building on Today’s Core Business

Creating one set of building blocks that every .NET application can use is paramount to delivering the .NET infrastructure. To lead this effort, Bob Muglia will take on a new role as group vice president of the .NET Services Group.

Muglia’s primary responsibility will be to develop the software technologies, subscription services and new user interface that will help consumers, businesses and software developers realize the full potential of the Internet.

“Microsoft is investing significant resources in the .NET initiative while continuing to stay very focused on our core businesses,” said Muglia. “We think this is a winning strategy for consumers, businesses, software developers and Microsoft.”

The following Microsoft executives will lead the .NET efforts under Muglia:

David Cole , senior vice president, will lead the Personal Services Platform Division. This division will be responsible for building the back-end services that form the infrastructure for both the MSN® network of Internet services and .NET.

Brian MacDonald , who is being promoted to senior vice president, will lead the Subscription Service Division. MacDonald will be responsible for the development of a subscription service that will offer users a cutting edge Internet experience.

Kai-Fu Lee , who is being promoted to vice president of the User Interface Technologies Division, will focus on the development of a next generation user interface that incorporates natural language and speech technologies and provides users with greater control over personal information and preferences.

The .NET Services Group will become part of the newly established Personal Services and Devices Group (PSDG), which will be led by Group Vice President Rick Belluzzo . In addition, PSDG will include MSN, Microsoft’s TV Service and Platform Division, the Home and Retail Division and the Mobility group.

…

The Platforms Strategy and Developer Group, under the leadership of Paul Maritz , group vice president, will continue to oversee business development, overall platform product strategy and planning, and Visual Studio® .NET. Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET, with the .NET Framework, provides a single, rapid application development environment that enables an XML-based programming model to create and tie together highly distributed programmable web services, including the building block services built by the .NET Services Group and other groups at Microsoft.

…

Microsoft Vice President Sanjay Parthasarathy, who formerly reported to Maritz, has been appointed to a new developer evangelism and business development role, and will report directly to Ballmer.

“Microsoft’s developer relations efforts, which have always been a top priority for the company, will continue,” said Ballmer, “and will in fact be expanded, with Sanjay Parthasarathy responsible for driving business and technology relationships with a few key ISVs, dot-coms and venture capitalists. Sanjay also will play a coordinating role with the existing developer evangelism teams within Microsoft’s business divisions.”

…

In addition to Sanjay Parthasarathy’s new role, Yuval Neeman will continue as vice president of the Developer Division, reporting to Group Vice President Jim Allchin. Mike Nash, vice president of the Content Development and Delivery Group, which includes the MSDN® developer program, also will report to Allchin. Chris Atkinson, vice president for .NET Developer Solutions, will report to Senior Vice President Paul Flessner. Charles Stevens, vice president of the Business Solutions Group, will continue to oversee Microsoft’s relationships with ISVs.

I was at Microsoft for 19 years. My last role was as corporate VP of the Startup Business Accelerator, a new division I created to focus on building startups for Microsoft.

I was corporate VP of the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group [DPE or D&PE] from 2000 to 2007. I built the D&PE division from 0 to over 1,500 people worldwide and grew Microsoft’s developer tools business from $500 million to $1 billion.

…

Under Parthasarathy’s DPE successor, Walid Abu-Hadba (who came first a GM, and after half a year got his corporate VP title) .NET went into oblivion as his assignment had no mention of .NET at all, as evidenced by the announcement of his VP appointment [press release, Feb 8, 2008]:

… to focus on platform strategy and evangelism of the Microsoft platform to developers, IT professionals and partners worldwide.

“The future of computing is developed by students and young entrepreneurs working in dorm rooms, garages and coffee shops,” Abu-Hadba says. “Microsoft is enabling the next generation of software developers by providing the tools and opportunities they need to learn, develop skills, and turn their ideas into realties. We are committed to doing everything we can to help spur those game-changing advancements through programs like Imagine Cup, DreamSpark, and BizSpark.”

As a clear sign of transfer of responsibility for .NET another new executive appointment had been made at the same time, as quoting from the same release:

With it even the fate of remaining .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET parts of the original .NET vision had already been decided: something different should take up their position even in the developer platform space. Although Guthrie got a mandate to try to revitalize the .NET developmentplatform with the already promising universal web browser plug-in effort, Microsoft Silverlight (see also the Microsoft Silverlight History), that effort ended with insufficient result (not Guthrie’s and his team fault, but the failure of the whole plug-in concept in 2010/11). That fate had been finalized byhis next executive move to being (quoting from his July 15, 2011 exec bio):

… responsible for delivering the development platform for Windows Azure, as well as the .NET Framework and Visual Studio technologies used in building Web and server applications.

A founding member of the .NET project, Guthrie has played a key role in the Microsoft developer space since 1998. Today, Guthrie manages the development teams that build the developer platform for Windows Azure, Windows AppFabric Server, BizTalk Server, IIS, ASP.NET, WCF, WF and the Web, and Web Service and Workflow features of Visual Studio.

For the future of the .NET development platform this meant more precisely (as quoted from an internal May 2, 2011 Developer Division memo by ZDNet):

Sharpening our Focus around Azure and Cloud Computing. Azure and the cloud are incredibly important initiatives that will play a huge role in the future success of STB [Server and Tools Business] and the company. Given the strategic importance of Cloud Computing for STB and Microsoft, we need a strong leader to help drive the development of our Cloud Application Platform and help us win developers for Azure. We’ve asked Scott Guthrie to take on this challenge and lead the Azure Application Platform team that will report to Ted Kummert in BPD [Business Platform Division inside the Server and Tools Business lead by Satya Nadella] … This team will combine the Web Platform & Tools team led by Bill Staples, the Application Server Group led by Abhay Parasnis and the Portal and Lightweight Role teams from the Windows Azure team. Scott’s transition is bittersweet for me. I personally will miss him very much, but I’m confident that Scott will bring tremendous value to our application platform. With Scott’s current organization finishing up important milestones, the timing is right for Scott to take on this role.

With Scott’s transition, the Client Platform team led by Kevin Gallo will report directly to me and will continue its focus on the awesome work that the team is doing for the different Microsoft platforms. The .NET Core Platform team led by Ian Carmichael will report to Jason Zander which will bring the managed languages and runtime work closer together. Patrick Dussud will report to Ian Carmichael and will continue being the technical leader for .NET.

Satya Nadella’s appointment [Feb 9, 2011] was actually made as Bob Muglia, previously president of the Server and Tools Business, decided to leave Microsoft because of Steve Ballmer’s decision “that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB” [internal e-mail from Ballmer made public, Jan 10, 2011]. While Ballmer mentioned Muglia’s successes in hie e-mail he didn’t mention on crucial failure for which Ballmer himself was in fact responsible. Returning again to that August 9, 2000 decision:

Microsoft Moves to Deliver on its Vision for the Next Generation Internet While Continuing Strong Focus on Core Businesses

…

Alignment for the Future — Building on Today’s Core Business

Creating one set of building blocks that every .NET application can use is paramount to delivering the .NET infrastructure. To lead this effort, Bob Muglia will take on a new role as group vice president of the .NET Services Group.

Muglia’s primary responsibility will be to develop the software technologies, subscription services and new user interface that will help consumers, businesses and software developers realize the full potential of the Internet.

“Microsoft is investing significant resources in the .NET initiative while continuing to stay very focused on our core businesses,” said Muglia. “We think this is a winning strategy for consumers, businesses, software developers and Microsoft.”

The following Microsoft executives will lead the .NET efforts under Muglia:

David Cole , senior vice president, will lead the Personal Services Platform Division. This division will be responsible for building the back-end services that form the infrastructure for both the MSN® network of Internet services and .NET.

Brian MacDonald , who is being promoted to senior vice president, will lead the Subscription Service Division. MacDonald will be responsible for the development of a subscription service that will offer users a cutting edge Internet experience.

Kai-Fu Lee , who is being promoted to vice president of the User Interface Technologies Division, will focus on the development of a next generation user interface that incorporates natural language and speech technologies and provides users with greater control over personal information and preferences.

The .NET Services Group will become part of the newly established Personal Services and Devices Group (PSDG), which will be led by Group Vice President Rick Belluzzo . In addition, PSDG will include MSN, Microsoft’s TV Service and Platform Division, the Home and Retail Division and the Mobility group.

Bob Muglia, however, failed tremendously on this assigment and quite quickly. His last public exposure in that assigned capacity was in the time of the first developers release of .NET My Services (formerly codenamed “HailStorm”) and the .NET Compact Framework, which brings .NET to a variety of “smart” devices [Oct 23, 2001]. In an adjacent Q&A: For Developers, Microsoft Group VP Muglia Says Microsoft is Delivering on .NET Now [Microsoft feature story, Oct 23, 2001] he is answering questions about .NET My Services. Let’s quote the most relevant ones from the point of view of the original .NET vision:

PressPass: What will the advent of the .NET My Services mean to developers and business customers? To consumers?

Muglia: For developers, it means a powerful platform for building Web services that offer real value to customers. The value comes from providing users with the ability to log on to Web sites easily, and receive timely and relevant notifications that they’ve consented to receive. By doing this, we think that businesses will see more demand for their products. At the same time, consumers will benefit from the new breed of applications that result — applications that deliver more convenience and value than ever before.

For example, eBay has deployed the .NET Alerts service on their Website to make sure that their customers are notified when they are outbid. That way, customers can act on that information quickly and easily, and avoid losing an auction item they really want.

Muglia: The creation of user-centric services are central to our .NET strategy. . NET My Services takes advantage of the. NETbased technologies and architecture that make it possible for applications, devices, and services to work together. These services make user consent the basis for who can access user information, what they can do with it, and how long they have permission to do so.

PressPass: Can you give us examples of the kinds of things that developers will be able to do with the .NET My Services platform?

Muglia: Starbucks is one early adopter of .NET My Services. They’re enabling some really forward-looking, cutting-edge wireless applications that may make standing in line inside a store a thing of the past. They are working with Ontain on new services that will enable people to have their coffee preferences preset with Starbucks. Then they can place their order via their mobile phone, and when they arrive in the store, their drink is already made and paid for.

…

Having a strong infrastructure on the back end for millions of people to use Web services is key, and here we build upon the strength of the Windows Server family and the .NET Enterprise Servers as well.

We’ve offered a set of foundation building block services, which we call .NET My Services, centered around Passport and alerts, to enable developers to focus more on their business logic and the business problem that theyre trying to solve rather than re-implement that plumbing again and again and again, and Ill talk some more about that.

…

The first key thing is authentication. This is led by our Passport service, which we launched in 1999. There are over 200 million accounts today. We handle over 3.5 billion authentications per month, which is truly staggering when you think about it, when you think about the scalability of the .NET platform.

We support federation, so corporations can have their own version of authentication, have their own databases, have their own information about their employees and their customers, while still providing a single programming model and single toolset, all covered by the .NET framework.

And, of course, weve announced services for notification as well to deliver anytime, anywhere, on any device alerts. This is our .NET Alert Service. Again, its user-controlled: I subscribe to the events that Im interested in. I route them to the devices that I want at the time I want with the priority that I want.

So I think Web services are pretty compelling today. If you think about what we announced at the PDC, the foundation for our Web services vision and the foundations for our Global XML Web Services Architecture, which we codenamed GXA, you can get quite a lot done with XML Web services today.

…

For servers clearly the biggest thing on the horizon for us is the shipment of Windows .NET Server later in the year. Again, we redefine the category of what it means to be a Web service application server.

For smart clients Stinger is our key smart phone device coming out. I showed you Pocket PC phone edition. Tablet PC will also ship later in the year. I think thats an incredibly exciting device.

Well have the key tools as well, the smart device extensions. If you know Visual Studio you know how to write a Pocket PC application. The .NET Compact Framework, which again is supportable across not just CE but other operating systems as well.

And our services roadmap will start with Passports and alerts and well move up to .NET My Services going forward in the future.

…

PressPass: What exactly is the agreement with the FTC?

Smith: Last August the FTC approached us about how we described some of our privacy and security measures in Passport. And for the last year we have worked to provide the FTC with information about our policies and security measures and to answer their questions. At the end of the process they had four specific concerns. This agreement addresses their concerns and puts specific processes in place to assure our customers that we are meeting a high bar for security and privacy protection. It also governs the way we communicate with consumers about our service going forward.

…

PressPass: Let’s go through the four concerns of the FTC point by point. First, the FTC said that you failed to implement and document procedures to prevent, detect, monitor or document unauthorized access.

Smith: We have always believed that the security measures deployed at Passport have been reasonable and appropriate relative to industry standards and norms. But we recognize that security needs have evolved, and a level that we considered reasonable when we launched the service in 1999 is no longer reasonable today. We have continued to advance and improve the service’s security and privacy. In some cases, this has meant introducing new technologies, and in other cases it has meant creating new processes and procedures. The FTC’s complaint asserts that some of these technologies and procedures should have been in place and fully documented from Passport’s inception. We understand this concern, and we are confident that we are on a path to meet the current high bar for security and that this will be confirmed when the third-party audit we agreed to conduct is completed.

PressPass: Second, the FTC asserts that you were incorrect in your statement that purchases using a Passport Wallet are safer or more secure than purchases made without a Wallet.

Smith: What we were intending to convey was that using Passport Wallet at a Passport Wallet site is often “safer” and “more secure” than making a credit card purchase at another site that did not utilize the same encryption technologies to protect user credit card data. Passport Wallet sites are required to employ encryption technologies that clearly are safer than providing credit card information in the clear. The FTC’s complaint asserts that some people may have thought we were comparing a Passport Wallet purchase and a non-Wallet purchase made at the same site, and that at most sites encryption is used whether you use a Wallet or not. While it is worth noting that many Passport Wallet merchants did not adopt these encryption technologies until they were added as support for the Passport Wallet, we have recognized the FTC’s point and have already changed the language in our advertising.

PressPass: The FTC also claims that you collected some information that was not mentioned in your privacy policy.

Smith: The FTC made a very thorough review of our Passport privacy statement, as well as our related policies and procedures. After this review, the FTC Complaint asserts that only one thing was not adequately described. That is a temporary log that we keep and use to permit our customer service representatives to support Passport users who have contacted our support team. It’s important to note that no personal information has been shared with anyone else or misused in any manner as a result of these temporary logs. The FTC Complaint itself recognizes that the log is only “linked to a user’s name in order to respond to a user’s request for service.” We have already changed our Privacy Statement to clearly describe this temporary log and its limited use. We believe that our privacy commitment to consumers has always been strong, and we are heartened by the fact that that this one readily correctable omission was the only issue identified over the course of this in-depth review by the FTC.

PressPass: The Complaint says that Kid’s Passport claimed to provide parents with certain controls that it does not provide.

Smith: The FTC’s Complaint asserts that our original Web materials relating to Kids Passport were not as clear as they should have been in describing the capabilities and the limitations of the Kids Passport service, particularly in that it only permits users to control information provided to sites that are Kids Passport sites. It also asserts that it has been possible for some children to get around some of the parental controls that Kids Passport does provide. While we believed at the time that we were making a fair representation of the features and limitations of our service, we understand the FTC’s concerns. We have taken steps to make the parental controls provided by Kids Passport more “kid-proof,” and we have revised the description of Kids Passport in our Web materials and privacy statement to clarify the points raised by the FTC. In fact, Kids Passport recently received certification from TRUSTe, an independent non-profit initiative whose mission it is to build trust and confidence in the Internet.

…

But this didn’t help as the Passport history has ended as Microsoft account [current Wikipedia article as of Sept 9, 2012]

Microsoft account (previously Microsoft Wallet,[1]Microsoft Passport,[2].NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID) is a single sign-on web service developed and provided by Microsoft that allows users to log in to many websites using one account.

…

Support for OpenID

On October 27, 2008, Microsoft announced that it was publicly committed to supporting the OpenID framework, with Windows Live ID becoming an OpenID provider.[6] This would allow users to use their Windows Live ID to sign-in to any website that supports OpenID authentication. There has been no update on Microsoft’s planned implementation of OpenID since August 2009.[7]

…

<as the history after the FCC agreement>

In 2003, Faisal Danka,[20] a British IT Security expert, revealed a serious flaw in Microsoft Passport, through which any account linked to Microsoft Passport or Hotmail could easily be cracked by using any common browser.

Microsoft had pushed for non-Microsoft entities to create an Internet-wide unified-login system.[citation needed] Examples of sites that used Microsoft Passport were eBay and Monster.com, but in 2004 those agreements were cancelled.[21] In August 2009, Expedia sent notice out stating they no longer support Microsoft Passport / Windows Live ID.[citation needed]

In 2012, Windows Live ID changed its name to Microsoft account.[22][23]

For me the morale of this, My .NET Services (alias Hailstorm) story is that without an extremely strong and capable, general constructor type leader, responsible for the delivery of the whole .NET vision (all along), a vision like the original .NET cannot succeed, if at all. With Ballmer’s August 9, 2000 decision not only the responsibilities were spread over all of Microsoft, but even the leadership was quite divided and diverse: Steve Ballmer, Bob Muglia, Eric Rudder, Sanjay Parthasarathy (who was under Rudder initially but essentially independent), … and—most importantly—Bill Gates himself, who as the CEO just months before had tremendous influence and respect throughout the organization, but was “clever enough” not to take any formal leadership responsibility by occupying a quite undefined “chief software architect” position.

Muglia was removed from his central position in summer of 2002 and put into a kind of quarantine as head of the Enterprise Storage Division till summer 2005 when he became head of the Server and Tools Business (taking over BTW from nobody else as Eric Rudder who failed as the initial leader of the Server and Tools Business).

Then came Ray Ozzie to the rescue who put the foundation for the original .NET vision into order: Ray Ozzie: Churchill Club [transcript of remarks by Ray Ozzie, chief software architect for Microsoft, speaking at the Churchill Club, San Jose, Calif., June 5, 2009]

Our program this evening is called The Potential of Cloud Computing. We are honored to have with us Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, and Steven Levy, Senior Writer with Wired magazine

…

STEVEN LEVY: So you get to Microsoft, and was Microsoft sufficiently cloudy for you? Did you feel you had to block the sun?

RAY OZZIE: The hailstorm [obvious reference to .NET My Services which were code named Hailstorm] had passed. (Laughter.) When I got to, as you said, I had the opportunity in ’97 when I left IBM to kind of return to zero. When you’re fortunate, and you’ve had a successful product you get caught up in everything that it takes to make it successful. Ultimately you end up doing a lot of customer work. And then I decided that I needed to get back to technology. I returned to zero and Groove was built in ’97 for about eight years until we were acquired. And it was born to be Internet. And it took a contrarian approach, as opposed to using Web servers as the core infrastructure for how it was built. It was a purely peer-to-peer system, ultimately augmented with cloud servers, and enterprise integration servers, and management servers, and things like that. But, the great thing about it was I did have a chance to kind of get into the ethos of what is the net, and ultimately what is the Web.

By the time I got to Microsoft [in 2005, but he assumed the CSA (chief software architect) role in June 2006, when chairman/CSA Bill Gates announced his intent to relinquish the role on the transition from Microsoft to working full-time at his foundation], respectfully, they were very busy working on things that would ultimately become Vista, and Office 2007, a large part of the company. But, I felt as though it was kind of like back to the future in many ways. There was a lot of PC thinking, the PC was still the center of most of – of how most people thought about things, and it was a little scary, because by that time I had a perspective that there is this transformation happening. I still think the PC is amazingly relevant, but it’s the connected PC, it’s the PC connected to the cloud, connected to other PCs, PC connected to phones, TVs, and so on. So, I worked with Steve and Bill on a plan to change management, basically.

…

STEVEN LEVY: And Azure is going to let people build their own Hotmail, is that right?

RAY OZZIE: That’s right. In essence, the nature of Windows Azure, at one extreme not talking ahead of what’s shipping today, but the nature of what we’re building will enable people to wrap existing workloads, existing Windows Server workloads in a way that with as little change as possible they can move those workloads up into a cloud environment, and that could be a private cloud or a public cloud environment. And even they need some work, because configuration-wise, in terms of networking, there’s different latencies between operating things in the cloud and on premises, but with as minimal change as possible to bring existing workloads up.

But, more ideally laying out programming design patterns, and building an infrastructure so that you could say, this is what an ideal cloud program looks like, this is the way you factor the roles, the front-end roles, the mid-tier roles, this is what database looks like in the cloud. This is how you build a program with no single point of failure from day one, with elastic ability to scale form day one, and so on. And so that’s, in essence, what Azure is.

STEVEN LEVY: And Microsoft, of course, is going to eventually have all its own cloud applications on –

RAY OZZIE: That’s right. When I got there, if you look at Hotmail, Messenger, and so on, each one grew up, whether because of acquisition, or because of the state of the art at the time, grew up as a stovepipe. Each one had its own management systems, each one had its own storage, cheap storage system. Each had its own ops group. In some cases they had their own data centers. And we, in essence, said, what is the right way of re-conceptualizing this so that they could all go into a common infrastructure.

Another thing is that, and we could probably talk for a long, long time, because we started basically at a much lower level. We started with the notion of, what would a data center look like from a physical perspective moving forward. And at that point we were – we had just transitioned from what we refer to as a generation one to a generation two data center, where generation one is essentially you have screw drivers and people who install OSes, and buy PCs, at the tens of PCs. Gen two is you’re buying more standardized racks, but it’s still fairly manual.

Gen three is essentially what we’re in deployment on right now, with containerized data centers, where you build the – you build the building, you spent $300, $400, $500 million building a building, and power and cooling, and big stalls. And then as you need capacity, semi trailers roll in with thousands of PCs at a time, and they kind of plug the – but even in that environment you still have to pre-invest in the land, you have to pre-invest in the power and cooling infrastructure to build the shell for that thing.

The next generation that we’re in testing now in a few places in the world are, in essence, free-standing, completely modular data centers, where every component of the data center from the UPSs, the cooling power, whatever conditioning you need, are all free-standing with no roots. So, all we do is prepare the property, build a security wall around it, bring the networking and power in, and negotiate the contracts for that. And then, truly, we don’t have to deal with a lot of pre-investment in inventory.

…

STEVEN LEVY: So … when is all this becoming available?

RAY OZZIE: The low levels are available in a kind of a beta, we call it community technology preview form. We’ll be going commercial soon on those low levels. But what excites me, frankly, more, is what’s happening at the high level in these services that we call online. They have changed services. The whole investment is tremendous. A year, year-and-a-half ago when we started talking about this with customers, with integrators and partners, you know, they didn’t really understand why they wanted to do this. Now, these integrators are building practices around this. You have partners out there, and our own sales force knocking on people’s doors saying, how can we save you money? Here is a way that we can save you money. We’ll make money. You’ll – it will cost you less, and it’s good all around.

STEVEN LEVY: So, the second part of this, the mesh.

RAY OZZIE: Yes.

STEVEN LEVY: Explain that.

RAY OZZIE: Well, everything that we’ve been talking about really is more or less the back end side of what cloud computing looks like. What really turns me on, just because I’m kind of genetically, even though I did systems early in my career, I really want to ship a mass-market app, it’s kind of addictive. We like it. And, the thing that excites me is the transformation that’s happening at the user experience level, and how we consume devices. I mean, we’re moving to a world where we have so many different types of devices, and number of devices in our lives.

And stated kind of abstractly, but probably most coherently, if you were designing an OS today for the experiences that need to be delivered today, you would design it differently. You would have the cloud at the center, everything is all connecting to the cloud, and you would use those devices in rich ways that were appropriate to that device, but leverage that connection to the cloud and to the other devices. So, it would be very easy to buy a six-pack of netbooks at the holiday season, and give them to the kids, because you know that all you have to do is drop them on your desk, or on the table, login, and all the apps are cached, all the data is synced. There’s no reason why code that comes to the client, any kind of code, whether it’s assembly language wrapped up in an exe, or whatever, it should all be cached like JavaScript is cached. It should all be sandboxed like the browser sandbox. Data should be synchronized. The Web isn’t there yet on that, but in terms of technology to enhance the Web and bring us in that direction, you know, that’s the opportunity.

…

STEVEN LEVY: One more question, to what degree do the productivity apps become totally cloud-based?

RAY OZZIE: I don’t think it’s – they’ll be totally cloud-based in the realm, in the – let me back up. There’s kind of a – in order to get things going across the company you need meetings, you need to say things, say them again, and say them again. So we say three screens and a cloud, three screens and a cloud, three screens and a cloud, throughout the company. And what that means is everything we deliver, from a user experience perspective, will be – will have some aspect of its value delivered across the PC class of device, the phone class of device, and the TV class of device. Every one of them will have something, and all will be connected to the cloud. That will bring them all together.

The Office experience, it’s not software for a PC. It’s productivity. People are paying for productivity. So every person when they buy Office will be doing editing, and looking at big stuff, and big desktop screens, because that’s what it’s good for. The PC, nothing will ever be the PC in terms of hitting page down, or the down arrow on a big spreadsheet, and scrolling around. It’s just so compelling. And so that’s how it should be delivered.

Yes, it has to be cached, it should be delivered from the cloud, but its native code for the PC is great. But, people, most of the world’s people don’t come together on the PC, they come together on the Web. And we do a lot of sharing. You don’t create documents for yourself very often. You create them as part of larger things. So the sharing scenarios, the collaboration scenarios are homed, rooted on the Web. And then there are phone scenarios. Everything that we do, you go to meetings, and productivity, you don’t always take your laptop, but you probably always carry your phone with you. The phone has your location. The phone has a recorder. The phone has a little thing that you can take a picture of what’s on the whiteboard. The phone is an amazing companion to the Office scenario. So 100 percent of Office will be cloud, 100 percent will be mobile, 100 percent will be PC.

His The Internet Services Disruption [Ray Ozzie, Oct 28, 2005] memo refers to .NET as it had been delivered (not the original vision) which is still true, only more advanced than that time:

In 2000, in the waning days of the dot com bubble, we yet again reflected on our strategy and refined our direction. After taking a more deliberative look at the internet and its implications for software, we came to the conclusion that the internet would go beyond browsing and should support programmability on a global scale. We observed that certain aspects of our most fundamental platform – the tools and services that developers use when building their software – would not likely satisfy the emerging security and interoperability requirements of the internet. So we embarked upon .NET, a transformative new generation of the platform and tools built around managed code, the XML format and web services programming model. At the time, it was a risky bet to build natively around XML, but this bet paid off handsomely and .NET has become the most popular development environment in the world.

…

Our products have embraced the internet in many amazing ways. We’ve transformed the desktop into a rich platform for interactive internet browsing, media and communications-centric applications. We’ve transformed Windows into best-of-breed infrastructure for internet applications and services. We’ve created, in .NET, the most popular development platform in the world. We’ve got amazing products in Office and our other IW offerings, having fully embraced standards such as XML, HTML, RSS and SIP. Our MSN team has demonstrated great innovation and has held its own in a highly competitive and rapidly changing environment – particularly with Spaces and in growing a base of 180M active Messenger users worldwide. The Xbox team has also built a huge user community and has demonstrated that internet-based “Live” interaction is a high-value, strong differentiator.

More .NET background

Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet [Microsoft White Paper, June 22, 2000], since not available on the Microsoft site anymore, the below text is reconstructed from source1 and source2:

Overview: A Revolutionary Business

Revolutions are a way of life in the computer industry. Only 20 years ago, the world was still in the mainframe era. Few people had access to computers, and then it was only via the nearest IT department. The PC and the graphical user interface changed all that, democratizing computing for tens of millions of people and transforming the computer into a truly mass-market product. Corporations realized that networks of PCs and PC-based servers could change the way they did business, while for consumers the PC quickly established itself as a new medium for home entertainment. Then the Internet came along. It revolutionized the way we communicate, created a rich new source of information and entertainment, and added an “e” to commerce. Today, close to 300 million people worldwide use the Web. According to International Data Corp., more than a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of business will be transacted over the Internet this year.

Yet for all these wonders, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Today’s Internet largely mirrors the old mainframe model. Despite bountiful bandwidth, information is still locked up in centralized databases, with “gatekeepers” controlling access. Users must rely on the Web server to perform every operation, just like the old timesharing model. Web sites are isolated islands and cannot communicate with each other on a user’s behalf in any meaningful way. Today’s Web does little more than simply serve up individual pages to individual users — pages that mostly present HTML “pictures” of data, but not the data itself (at present, making both available is too technically demanding for most Web sites). And the browser is in many respects a glorified read-only dumb terminal — you can easily browse information, but it is difficult to edit, analyze or manipulate (i.e., all the things knowledge workers actually need to do with it). Personalization consists of redundantly entering and giving up control of your personal information to every site you visit. You have to adapt to the technology, instead of the technology adapting to you.

These problems are multiplied if you use more than one PC or mobile device. To access your online information, e-mail, offline files and other data, you have to struggle with multiple (and often incompatible) interfaces, varying levels of data access, and only intermittent synchronization of all the information you need (i.e., when you physically link your device with your PC). Online data is presented in an incomplete and predefined format, greatly limiting its usefulness. The concept of a customized “personal information space” that adapts to your needs is still a dream.

For the Web developer, the tools to build, test and deploy engaging Web sites are hopelessly inadequate. Many focus more on building attractive rather than useful Web sites. None of them address the entire software lifecycle, from design to development to deployment to maintenance, in a way that is consistent and efficient. No system today lets developers write code for the PC and deploy it to a variety of devices.

Corporate users face additional challenges. While the advent of farms of smaller servers has made the overall computing experience more reliable by eliminating single points of failure, it has made system management more complex. Performance measurement, capacity planning and operations management are challenging in today’s multi-tier, multi-function Web sites. New e-commerce systems rarely map well or interoperate with legacy business systems. And building systems that securely span the firewall, so customers and partners can intelligently engage with your business, is so difficult that many businesses resort to costly duplicate systems.

Is all this really as good as it gets? Everyone believes the Web will evolve, but for that evolution to be truly empowering for developers, businesses and consumers, a radical new vision is needed. Microsoft’s goal is to provide that vision and the technology to make it a reality.

Microsoft .NET: Beyond Browsing, Beyond the Dotcom

Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that melds computing and communications in a revolutionary new way, offering every developer the tools they need to transform the Web and every other aspect of the computing experience. We call this initiative Microsoftò .NET, and for the first time it enables developers, businesses and consumers to harness technology on their terms. Microsoft .NET will allow the creation of truly distributed Web Services that will integrate and collaborate with a range of complementary services to serve customers in ways that today’s dotcoms can only dream of. Microsoft .NET will drive the Next Generation Internet. It really will make information available any time, any place and on any device.

The fundamental idea behind Microsoft .NET is that the focus is shifting from individual Web sites or devices connected to the Internet, to constellations of computers, devices and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions. People will have control over how, when and what information is delivered to them. Computers, devices and services will be able to collaborate with each other to provide rich services, instead of being isolated islands where the user provides the only integration. Businesses will be able to offer their products and services in a way that lets customers seamlessly embed them in their own electronic fabric. It is a vision that extends the personal empowerment first offered by the PC in the 1980s.

Microsoft .NET will help drive a transformation in the Internet that will see HTML-based presentation augmented by programmable XML-based information. XML is a widely supported industry standard defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, the same organization that created the standards for the Web browser. It was developed with extensive input from Microsoft Corp. but is not a proprietary Microsoft technology. XML provides a means of separating actual data from the presentational view of that data. It is a key to the Next Generation Internet, offering a way to unlock information so that it can be organized, programmed and edited; a way to distribute data in more useful ways to a variety of digital devices; and allowing Web sites to collaborate and provide a constellation of Web Services that will be able to interact with each another.

Microsoft .NET comprises the following:

Microsoft .NET platform — Includes .NET infrastructure and tools to build and operate a new generation of services; .NET User Experience to enable rich clients; .NET building block services, a new generation of highly distributed megaservices; and .NET device software to enable a new breed of smart Internet devices.

Microsoft .NET products and services — Includes Windows.NET, with a core integrated set of building block services; MSN.NET; personal subscription services; Office.NET; Visual Studio.NET; and bCentral for .NET.

Third-party .NET services — A vast range of partners and developers will have the opportunity to produce corporate and vertical services built on the .NET platform.

Microsoft .NET will take computing and communications far beyond the one-way Web to a rich, collaborative, interactive environment. Powered by advanced new software, Microsoft .NET will harness a constellation of applications, services and devices to create a personalized digital experience — one that constantly and automatically adapts itself to your needs and those of your family, home and business. It means a whole new generation of software that will work as an integrated service to help you manage your life and work in the Internet Age.

For consumers, that means the simplicity of integrated services; unified browsing, editing and authoring; access to all your files, work and media online and off; a holistic experience across devices; personalization everywhere; and zero management. It means, for example, that any change to your information — whether input via your PC or handheld or smart credit card — will instantly and automatically be available everywhere that information is needed.

For knowledge workers and businesses, it means unified browsing, editing and authoring; rich coordinated communication; a seamless mobile experience; and powerful information-management and e-commerce tools that will transparently move between internal and Internet-based services, and support a new era of dynamic trading relationships.

For independent software developers, it means the opportunity to create advanced new services for the Internet Age — services that are able to automatically access and leverage information either locally or remotely, working with any device or language, without having to rewrite code for each environment. Everything on the Internet becomes a potential building block for this new generation of services, while every application can be exposed as a service on the Internet.

The Microsoft .NET vision means empowerment for consumers, businesses, software developers and the entire industry. It means unleashing the full potential of the Internet. And it means the Web the way you want it.

The Microsoft .NET Platform: Building the Next Generation Internet

Built on the standard integration fabric of XML and Internet protocols, the Microsoft .NET platform is a revolutionary model for developing an advanced new generation of software. Previously, programming models have focused on a single system, even attempting to mask interactions with other systems to look like local interactions. Microsoft .NET is explicitly designed to allow the integration or orchestration of any group of resources on the Internet into a single solution. Today, this type of integration is extremely complex and costly. Microsoft .NET will make it intrinsic to all software development.

The loosely coupled XML-based Microsoft .NET programming model introduces the concept of creating XML-based Web Services. Whereas today’s Web sites are hand-crafted and don’t work with other sites without significant additional development, the Microsoft .NET programming model provides an intrinsic mechanism to build any Web site or service so that it will federate and collaborate seamlessly with any others. Just as the introduction of interchangeable components accelerated the Industrial Revolution, Microsoft .NET promises to hasten the development of the Next Generation Internet.

None of this will be possible without many partners and the millions of independent and corporate developers who have helped build today’s computer industry. As Alexander Graham Bell put it, “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” When DOS became popular on the PC, it created opportunities for a new generation of independent developers to build businesses around DOS-based applications. Windows took those opportunities to an even higher level. The opportunities for every developer afforded by Microsoft .NET will be greater still. In the next three years, Microsoft will invest $2 billion to enable industry partners, independent developers and corporate IT developers to build Microsoft .NET services.

For developers, Microsoft is creating an entirely new set of Microsoft .NET development tools, designed from the ground up for the Web, and spanning client, server and services. These tools will enable developers to transform the Web from today’s static presentation of information into a Web of rich interactive services. Microsoft’s breakthrough next-generation Visual Studio tool suite automates development of Web Services via the drag-and-drop rapid-application development paradigm pioneered by the Visual Basic development system — services that can be consumed on any platform that understands XML. Visual Studio even automatically generates XML code. Microsoft is also announcing a new set of BizTalk Orchestration tools that allow visual programming of business processes by composition of services, enabling business analysts to develop solutions the same way developers do.

The Microsoft .NET programming model gives independent developers the opportunity to focus fewer resources on where or how an application runs and more on what it does — on where they can add real value. Microsoft .NET addresses some of the biggest challenges facing developers, who today are wrestling with the tradeoff between functionality and manageability. It takes ASPs and application hosting to a new level, enabling the integration of hosted applications with other applications, whether hosted or not; the customization of those applications; the ability to program against those applications; and the option to run the applications offline.

In addition, developers will be able to leverage and customize a range of core Microsoft .NET building block services in their own applications and services, reducing the effort required to create compelling products. These core Microsoft .NET building block services correspond to areas of functionality where Microsoft has deep expertise and can provide value to a broad set of developers. In many cases, Microsoft is unifying developer building blocks in the Windows operating system with similar capabilities that are Internet-based today, to enable the easy delivery of highly distributed, programmable services that run across standalone machines, in corporate data centers and across the Internet.

With the option of subscribing to these core Microsoft .NET services off the shelf, developers can make a “buy or build” decision as to where they want to spend their development resources. Some may elect to build basic service capabilities themselves, but many will likely opt for a well-packaged solution with strong development tools support, just as many developers choose not to write their own printer drivers or windowing system with Windows and instead focus their resources on differentiating their own higher-level products.

The core Microsoft .NET building block services that will be offered include:

Identity — Building on Microsoft Passport and Windows authentication technology, provides levels of authentication ranging from passwords and wallets to smart cards and biometric devices. Enables developers to build services that provide personalization and privacy for their customers, who in turn can enjoy new levels of safe and secure access to their services, no matter where they are or on what device. Supported in the first major release of Windows.NET, code-named “Whistler.”

Notification and Messaging — Integrates instant messaging, e-mail, fax, voice mail and other forms of notification and messaging into a unified experience, delivered to any PC or smart device. Builds on the Hotmail Web-based e-mail service, Exchange and Instant Messenger.

Personalization — Puts you in control by enabling you to create rules and preferences that implicitly and explicitly define how notifications and messages should be handled, how requests to share your data should be treated, and how your multiple devices should be coordinated (e.g., always synchronize my laptop computer with the full contents of my Microsoft .NET storage service). It will also make moving your data to a new PC a snap.

XML Store — Uses a universal language (XML) and protocol (SOAP) to describe what data means, enabling data to maintain its integrity when transmitted and handled by multiple Web sites and users. The result is that Web sites become flexible services that can interact, and exchange and leverage each other’s data. Microsoft .NET also offers a secure, addressable place to store data on the Web. Each of your devices can access this, optimally replicating data for efficiency and offline use. Other services can access your store with your consent. Brings together elements of NTFS, SQL Server, Exchange and MSN Communities.

Calendar — A crucial dimension of user control is time: When is it permissible to interrupt me, and when should I be left alone? This becomes especially important as people use more devices more of the time, and as users and services interact more richly. Microsoft .NET provides the basis for securely and privately integrating your work, social, and home calendars so that they are accessible to all of your devices and, with your consent, other services and individuals. Builds on the Outlookò messaging and collaboration client and the Hotmail Calendar.

Directory and Search — Microsoft .NET makes it possible to find services and people with which to interact. Microsoft .NET directories are more than search engines or “yellow pages.” They can interact programmatically with services to answer specific schema-based questions about the capabilities of those services. They can also be aggregated and customized by other services and combined with them.

Dynamic Delivery — Enables Microsoft and developers to dynamically offer incremental levels of functionality and reliable automatic upgrades on demand, without user installation or configuration. Microsoft .NET proactively adapts to what you want to do, on any of your devices. This inversion of the traditional installation-dependent application model is a necessity in a world where users will enjoy the benefits of services on multiple devices.

Microsoft .NET’s distributed services will be available both online and off. A service can be invoked on a standalone machine not connected to the Internet, provided by a local server running inside a company, or accessed via the Internet cloud. Different instances can cooperate and exchange information through a process called federation, which allows organizations to decide whether to run their own infrastructure or host it externally without compromising their control or access to services across the Internet, or when not connected to the Internet. So, for example, a corporate directory service can federate with a service in the Internet cloud. This sets services based on Microsoft .NET far apart from today’s Internet-based offerings.

Microsoft .NET building block services can be consumed on any platform that supports XML. Windows will offer the best environment to create and deliver Web Services, while Windows-based clients will be optimized to distribute Web Services to every kind of device. And Microsoft Windows DNA 2000 already provides the first comprehensive XML-enabled infrastructure for building and operating Web Services.

The Microsoft .NET User Experience: Intelligent Interactivity

Today, computing revolves around two separate worlds — the world of applications on PCs and devices, and the world of Web sites. Microsoft .NET enables these two worlds to collaborate seamlessly, combining rich functionality with the Internet’s infinite ocean of information. It will transform today’s Web into the truly “intercreative space” that Tim Berners-Lee has envisioned.

Today, working across online and offline environments — even when using only a single PC — is a frustrating and inefficient experience. It is more disintegrated than integrated: Web browsing (read-only), creativity (authoring and editing), communications (e-mail, instant messaging), calendar and contacts (offline, device-dependent) each require separate applications that have widely varying functionality and compatibility. Most people would prefer a single, unified environment that adapts to whichever environment they are working in, moves transparently between local and remote services and applications, and is largely device-independent — a kind of universal canvas for the Internet Age. To make this a reality, Microsoft .NET offers users the following:

Natural Interface – A collection of technologies that enable the next generation of interactions between humans and computers — including speech, vision, handwriting and natural-language input via a new “type-in” box. Technologies can be combined for multi-model user interface. The Natural Interface provides the right User Experience for every device or environment.

Universal Canvas — An XML compound information architecture that integrates browsing, communications and document authoring in a single, unified environment, enabling users to synthesize and interact with information in a unified way. The universal canvas builds upon XML schema to transform the Internet from a read-only environment into a read/write platform, enabling users to interactively create, browse, edit, annotate and analyze information. Because the underlying information is XML, the universal canvas can bring together multiple sources of information from anywhere in the world to enable seamless data access, synthesis and use.

Information Agent — Manages your identity and persona over the Internet and provides greater control of how Web sites and services interact with you. Maintains your history, context and preferences — your past, present and future on the Internet. Supports privacy-enabling technologies such as P3P. Unlike today’s Internet, your personal information remains under your control and you decide who can access it. Enables you to create your personal preferences just once, which you can then permit any Web site or service to use.

Working with a new breed of smart devices, Microsoft .NET will also be the Web where you want it. Next Generation Internet devices will be designed to use hosted services and offer rich local processing capabilities. They will use the network intelligently, exploiting broadband links but being economical with wireless bandwidth, and will come in a range of new form factors, such as the tablet PC. Programmable and customizable, with automatic updates and zero administration, these smart devices will see explosive growth during the next five years, and they will partner with the ultimate smart Internet device: the PC.

Microsoft .NET: The Next Generation of Products and Services

In the long term, all applications software will likely be provided as a service, subscribed to over the Internet. This will allow Microsoft and other software service providers to provide better customer service, transparent installation and backup, and a positive feedback loop into the product-development process. Software delivered as a service would also allow Microsoft and independent developers to respond more swiftly with backups and antivirus protection.

We envision the majority of our software applications evolving into subscription services over time, while we continue to offer our existing platforms and applications. From the outset, however, Microsoft will offer a range of .NET products and experiences including the following:

Windows.NET — The next generation of the Windows desktop platform, Windows.NET supports productivity, creativity, management, entertainment and much more, and is designed to put users in control of their digital lives. Tightly integrated with a core set of .NET building block services, it provides integrated support for digital media and collaboration, and can be personalized. It can also be programmed by .NET services, including MSN.NET, bCentral for .NET, and Office.NET. Windows.NET will provide a rich platform for developers wanting to write .NET applications and services. Microsoft will also continue to offer and support versions of the Windows platform without .NET services.

MSN.NET — By combining the leading content and services of MSN with the new .NET platform, MSN.NET will enable consumers to create a single digital personality and leverage smart services to ensure consistent, seamless and safe access to the information, entertainment and people they care about any time, any place and on any device. MSN.NET will build on a new integrated client, currently in beta.

Personal Subscription Services — In addition to MSN.NET, Microsoft will build a set of premium consumer-oriented services on the .NET platform that will build on existing Microsoft entertainment, gaming, education and productivity products. These services will give people the power of traditional desktop applications with the flexibility, integration and roaming support of the new .NET family of User Experiences.

Office.NET — Advanced communications and productivity tools, including universal canvas technology that combines communication, browsing and document authoring into a single environment, enabling users to synthesize and interact with information in a unified way. Universal collaboration services will enable anyone to collaborate with people inside and outside their companies. A new architecture, based on smart clients and services, will provide rich functionality, performance and automatic deployments on any device. Microsoft will also continue to offer and support versions of Office without .NET services.

Visual Studio.NET — XML-based programming model and tools, fully supported by MSDN and Windows DNA 2000 servers. Enables the easy delivery of highly distributed, programmable services that run across standalone machines, in corporate data centers and across the Internet.

bCentral for .NET — Cutting-edge range of subscription-based services and tools for small and growing businesses. Includes hosted messaging and e-mail, enhanced commerce services, and a new customer relationship management (CRM) service built on the .NET platform. The enhanced commerce and customer management services will enable small businesses to better serve their customers online. Functionality will include support for rich hosted catalogs and the ability to track interactions with customers to enable personalized service.

Conclusion: The .NET Revolution

Ten years ago Microsoft set out a vision of a world with Information at Your Fingertips. Back then, information was anything but: modems were connected at 4800 baud, most messages were sent by fax rather than e-mail, and few people had even heard of the Internet. Although we envisioned a world in which people could connect with the information they wanted, when they wanted it, from whatever device they wanted, we had no idea what technologies would help make that a reality. Today, we do.

The Microsoft .NET platform will revolutionize computing and communications in the first decade of the 21st century by being the first platform that takes full advantage of both.

Microsoft .NET will make computing and communicating simpler and easier than ever. It will spawn a new generation of Internet services, and enable tens of thousands of software developers to create revolutionary new kinds of online services and businesses. It will put you back in control, and enable greater control of your privacy, digital identity and data. And software is what makes it all possible.

Microsoft .NET will only succeed if others share broadly in its success. Microsoft’s business philosophy has always been to produce low-cost, high-volume, high-performance software that empowers individual and business users, and creates opportunities for our customers, partners and every independent developer. That philosophy is what sets Microsoft apart from its competitors — and Microsoft .NET takes it to a new level.

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Microsoft, MSN, Visual Studio, bCentral, Windows, Visual Basic, BizTalk, Outlook, Hotmail, IntelliSense and MSDN are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The Microsoft® .NET platform will fundamentally change the way companies interact with their customers and partners over the Internet.

What Microsoft’s .NET Vision Means for Businesses
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will drive the Next Generation Internet. Microsoft calls this initiative .NET, and its purpose is to make information available any time, any place, on any device. Read what .NET will do for businesses.

Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet
Microsoft .NET will allow the creation of truly distributed Web Services that will integrate and collaborate with a range of complementary services to drive the Next Generation Internet. It really will make information available any time, any place and on any device.

Bill Gates’ .NET Keynote
See a transcript of remarks made by Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, introducing the .NET platform.

Steve Ballmer on the .NET Platform
See a transcript of remarks made by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft president and chief executive officer, on how the .NET platform will affect Microsoft’s business offerings.

Bob Muglia on the New Business User Experience
See a transcript of remarks made by Bob Muglia, group vice president of Microsoft’s Business and Productivity Group, on how the .NET platform will change the way people work in business, and ulimately change business itself.

Company Introduces .NET Generation of Software

Signaling a new era of personal empowerment and business opportunity for consumers, businesses and software developers, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled the vision and road map for its next generation of software and services, the Microsoft® .NET platform. Capitalizing on the explosion of Internet-based computing and communications, Microsoft .NET (pronounced “dot-net” ) will provide easier, more personalized and more productive Internet experiences by harnessing constellations of smart devices and Web sites with advanced software through Internet protocols and formats.

This new family of Microsoft .NET products and technologies replaces the previous working title of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) and includes software for developers to build next-generation Internet experiences as well as power a new breed of smart Internet devices. Microsoft also announced plans for new products built on the .NET platform, including new generations of the Microsoft Windows® operating system, Windows DNA servers, Microsoft Office, the MSN™ network of Internet services and the Visual Studio® development system.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who in January also became chief software architect in order to devote himself fully to this effort, said today that Microsoft and industry partners will pioneer the “Next Generation Internet” through software that breaks down today’s barriers between “digital islands” — computers, devices, Web sites, organizations and industries — to help realize the full potential of the Internet.

“The impact of the Internet has been spectacular to date, but the pace of innovation will accelerate over the next five years,” Gates said. “Our goal is to move beyond today’s world of standalone Web sites to an Internet of interchangeable components where devices and services can be assembled into cohesive, user-driven experiences.”

Through a series of customer scenarios and technology demonstrations, Microsoft executives showcased new software technologies and underscored four key principles guiding the new .NET platform:

Improved User Experience Puts People in Control – .NET will give users a more productive and purposeful experience through greater user control over personal information and preferences, new user interface technologies, a new breed of smart Internet devices, and the ability to harness multiple devices and services toward a common goal. As the Internet becomes more personal, consumers will want software that enables them to define and control privacy. Microsoft is building innovative privacy technology into the foundation of Microsoft’s next-generation software, including Microsoft Passport, providing customers with control of their Internet experience. Microsoft will host a personal Information Agent that will deliver consumers the ability to access, view, edit and delete the personal information that they enter at various sites. Additionally, Microsoft is incorporating privacy-enabling technologies based on the P3P specification into Microsoft’s next-generation operating systems.

Ease of Use/Simplicity – .NET facilitates the continuous delivery of software to customers via a distributed computing model for the Internet that uniquely exploits the abundance of both computing and communications.

Internet Standards – .NET is based on Internet protocols and standards for interactions between devices and services, and in particular relies on the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Business Integration and Opportunity – .NET creates opportunities for millions of developers not only to build Internet services and businesses more easily, but also to integrate those offerings directly with business partners and customers.

“Our guiding principles have always been about empowering individuals and creating opportunities for the industry. We are now taking that strategy to a new level by building a new platform based on Internet standards, which makes computing and communications easier for everyone,” Gates said.

“Today’s Internet experience can be confusing and difficult, with a jumble of applications, Web pages and devices, none of which work with one another on your behalf,” Gates said. “With the emergence of standards like XML, we now have the opportunity to revolutionize the way computers talk to one another on our behalf just as the browser changed the way we interact with computers.”

Introducing the .NET Platform

Gates today announced the new .NET platform, consisting of the following technologies:

.NET User Experience. A new set of technologies for building next-generation user experiences, including the new Universal Canvas XML-based compound information architecture, natural user interface, integral digital media support, privacy-enabling technologies for management and control of personal information, and the new Dynamic Delivery system for secure and seamless installation, updates, roaming and offline operation.

.NET Infrastructure and Tools. An implementation of the new XML-based programming model helps developers build, deliver, integrate, operate and federate Web services. Visual Studio 7.0, a new version of the world’s most popular developer toolset, will provide comprehensive, high-productivity support for XML-based Web service development, including the 50 percent of the world’s developers who use the Visual Basic® development system. The new BizTalk™ Orchestration tool dramatically simplifies business process integration over the Internet. The .NET Infrastructure and Tools build off the XML-enabled family of Windows DNA 2000 servers.

.NET Building Block Services. A new family of highly distributed, programmable developer services that run across standalone machines, in corporate data centers and across the Internet. Services include Identity, Notification and Messaging, Personalization, Schematized Storage, Calendar, Directory, Search and Software Delivery. These services bring together elements of Windows technology with Internet-based Microsoft services such as Passport, the MSN Hotmail® Web-based e-mail service, MSN Messenger and MSN Communities to deliver a truly distributed set of building blocks for developers to use in their own products whether they are programming for a single machine or across the Internet. Different instances of these services can cooperate and exchange information through a process called federation, which allows organizations to decide whether to run their own infrastructure or host it externally without compromising their control or access to services across the Internet or when offline.

.NET Device Software. An array of software to power a new breed of smart Internet-connected devices that can take maximum advantage of the .NET platform and fully participate in next-generation user experiences. Microsoft will deliver new versions of Windows supporting the .NET platform technologies that maintain and extend the PC’s role as an optimum way to take full advantage of the Internet. This software will XML-enable any device, support intelligent interaction with the network and .NET services and serve as a foundation to bring .NET User Experience technologies to non-PC devices such as Pocket PCs, set-top boxes, cellular phones and game consoles.

The .NET platform breaks new ground in terms of using Internet standards such as XML to link systems together; its commitment to improving both the user and the developer experience; the introduction of the first highly distributed services architecture for the Internet; and applications transparency across local machines, corporate data centers and Internet services through the process of federation.

New Opportunity for Developers, Partners, Customers

Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer outlined the new opportunities .NET will create for developers and partners and highlighted the support of leading technology partners.

“The Internet revolution must now move to its next stage: ensuring that the ocean of information and resources that is out there actually work together,” Ballmer said. “By creating a unified platform through which devices and services cooperate with each other, Microsoft will unleash a new wave of developer opportunity and creativity that will move us to a level of power and simplicity.”

Ballmer addressed some specific examples of who will benefit in the new era. “A shift of this magnitude has huge revenue potential,” Ballmer said, citing examples of traditional partners who will expand their applications to take advantage of new devices; customers who will programmatically expose their Web services to enhance customer service and develop new revenue sources; and new types of partners with creative ideas for how to enhance the Internet experience with automated, interactive Web services. “This new computing era will see a shift from people interacting with single devices to software serving people according to their individual preferences. Web developers are the key players who will drive that transformation.”

Microsoft .NET Products and Services

In addition to these core underlying platform technologies, Microsoft will also offer a selection of .NET experiences for individual audiences. They include the following:

Windows.NET. Windows.NET is the next generation of Windows. Windows.NET will be a product that supports productivity, creativity, management, entertainment and much more, and is designed to put users in control of their digital lives. It incorporates new .NET user experience technologies, is tightly integrated with .NET building block services including identity and search and provides integrated support for digital media. Windows.NET will be self-supporting, featuring services that provide ongoing support and updates as users need them. Windows.NET will provide a rich foundation for developers who want to create new .NET applications and services. It will offer a programmable user experience that can be customized by corporations and individuals and programmed by .NET services including MSN.NET, bCentral™ for .NET and Office.NET, as well as a host of third-party .NET services. The first release of Windows to incorporate .NET elements is scheduled to be available in 2001. Microsoft will also continue to offer support for versions of the Windows platform without .NET services.

MSN.NET . MSN.NET will deliver the first consumer user experience for the next generation Internet. By combining the leading content and services of MSN with the new .NET platform, MSN.NET will allow consumers to create a single digital personality and use smart services to ensure consistent, seamless and safe access to the information, entertainment and people they care about any time, any place and on any device. MSN.NET will build on a new integrated client, currently in beta, that brings together the best of MSN dynamic Web services, content, the .NET building block services and .NET device support to deliver a complete, integrated consumer experience. MSN will offer superior access to content and services from third-party developers and the broadest range of devices based on the opportunities afforded from the .NET platform.

Consumer Subscription Services. In addition to the MSN.NET consumer offering, Microsoft also plans to build a set of premium .NET services to offer a wide range of consumer-oriented services building on the .NET platform. These services will build on existing Microsoft consumer software in the area of entertainment, games, education and productivity. These services will give people the power of traditional desktop applications with the flexibility, integration and roaming support of the new .NET family of user experiences.

Office.NET. Microsoft announced Office.NET, a future productivity and communications service designed to meet the needs of 21st century knowledge workers. The Office.NET experience will deliver major new innovations to benefit customers in four areas. A new natural user interface will streamline how customers interact with the service. A new architecture, based on smart clients and services, will provide rich functionality, performance and automatic deployments. Universal collaboration services will enable anyone to collaborate with people inside and outside their companies. Office.NET services will extend any time, any place and on any device, along with personalization capabilities to enable a new level of freedom and control. Over time these technologies will be incorporated into a number of Microsoft services.

bCentral for .NET. Microsoft will significantly expand the bCentral small business portal, its small-business user experience, with several cutting-edge services built on the .NET platform. The expanded services include Outlook® Web services, enhanced commerce services and a new customer relationship management (CRM) service. Outlook Web services, built with .NET building block services, will provide browser-based messaging, calendaring and personal Information Agent features through the familiar Outlook interface and a Web folder for storing files and accessing them remotely. The enhanced commerce and customer management services will enable small business customers to better serve their customers online. Functionality is scheduled to include support for rich hosted catalogs and the ability to track interactions with customers to enable personalized service. These expanded services are scheduled to be made available broadly through Microsoft bCentral later this year.

Visual Studio.NET is an XML-based programming model and rapid application development tool that is fully supported by the MSDN™ developer service and Windows DNA 2000 servers. Visual Studio.NET enables the easy delivery of highly distributed, programmable services that run across standalone machines, in corporate data centers and across the Internet.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” ) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

Microsoft, Windows, MSN, Visual Studio, Visual Basic, BizTalk, Hotmail, bCentral, Outlook and MSDN are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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Id like to turn and talk a little bit though about the future.I mean, were all very excited.I think thats what brings us here today.Were excited about technology, about the PC, about the Internet.

And the question that we always have to come back to and ask ourselves as technology, people, as people are enthused about technology is whats going to happen next.If I asked you the question ten years from now, “Do you expect using the Internet to be largely the same or quite different than using the Internet today” , what would you say?Different.The fact that people are here today would say its going to be largely different.

If you though were to ask, “In what ways will using the Internet be different ten years from now than it is today” , wed get a stronger variety of answers.

And if you actually asked the question of “How will the Internet transformation from whatever we might call this generation to the next generation, how will it happen” , I think the answer is it will happen slowly for the next several years, slow change, slow change, slow change and then there will be kind of almost a hockey stick of accelerating change in the Internet.

Why do I say that?Were just to the point now where businesses and Web site producers are starting to see real value and starting to really get some traction with the first generation Web site s that theyve built.Were starting to get to the point where users are familiar with whats going on in the Internet.I dont think well expect to see a change that happens instantaneously, but sometime over the course of the next three, four, five, six years I think were going to see an incredible change come about the Internet.

What will characterize those changes?Well, if you think about what is deficient in the Internet today or what is deficient in the technology business today, it points you clearly to a few key things.And Ill start with a perspective of what will change about software, because in some senses thats the glue that brings all of this stuff together and its certainly the core of our business.

The software business, for at least the 20 years Ive been in this industry, has been primarily a business where you build the piece of software and you deploy it, and then you leave it alone and then you deploy it again.So we build a copy of Office.We put it in a box or a CD.We give it to you.You deploy it to your machine, to the machines in your organizations, whatever the case may be.Its a very static activity.Its not very dynamic and we all suffer in a sense with that.

The nature of software and I might add I think the nature of all goods that can be physically delivered on the Internet — music, financial services, entertainment; these are all services that can not only be ordered but also delivered on the Internet, but the character of those businesses, and particularly the software business will change.Software will become a service.Ten years from now because of the Internet we wont ship you disks.We will have — every software vendor will transform their products into a set of services, which are constantly updating themselves, monitoring your system, delivering you new functionality, storing information on your behalf, watching other things on the Internet on your behalf.The whole nature of what software is will be transformed in this next generation of the Internet.

For that to happen I think there are some things that have to change in the basic technology infrastructure in the Internet and the first and most significant is already happening.And thats the acceptance of XML as the protocol set for the next generation of the Internet.XML, as Im sure many people in the audience know, is a protocol that in some senses is a lower level protocol than HTML.HTML, the protocol which is used in Internet browsers today, lets you put up a Web page, and it describes whats on the page.XML is a protocol that actually describes the content, the data, the semantics, the code.It lives at a little bit lower level and it lets you pass meaning back and forth as opposed to just pictures of screen.

Now somebody might ask why is that a fundamental revolution?Well, the move to XML will change many things on the Internet.First, if will enable this notion of “software as a service” because you can really use the intelligence on a client and on a server.In todays Internet you can have a dumb device on one end, because all youre doing is sending down a screen full of information to the client.

Secondly, in the world of XML you actually have a world where Web site s can talk to Web site s.Today the world is pretty much producer-driven.Somebody builds a Web siteand you look at the Web site.And you could say some Web sites let you personalize them, but they let you personalize them exactly the way they want you to personalize them.We dont live in a world today where you can create your own Web page or Web siteout of information that comes from multiple sites.Suppose you have accounts with two or three different brokerage firms and banks.Theres no easy way to go collect that information and have it integrated.You have to go visit each one of those sites and look at the information and copy it down.

Suppose you want to — I dont know — look at a sports site and share your opinions about — I dont know –maybe today I shouldnt say the Argonauts, but share your opinions about the Argonauts or the Alouettes game from last night with your friends.How do annotate that Web site?How do you circle something and tell your friend, “Look at what I think” ?The Web today is a one-way medium.People present to you; you dont comment back onto the Web.Yes, you can send email and this and that, but the pages on the Web themselves you cant annotate, you cant commend upon, you cant share your comments and annotations with your friends.It makes it tough to do many of the things that at least Tim Burners Lee (ph), who was the original sort of founder of the World Wide Web, conceived of.

And so in this world of XML we envision a world in which Web site s talk to Web site s using this XML protocol.

Let me just give an example of some of the scenarios that I think the first two things should enable.Suppose youre going to go, you want to book a reservation to go visit a friend in Seattle.And you want to book the reservation.You want to tell the friend youre coming.And, of course, if your flights late, what do you want to have happen?You know, youd love to have some Web site notify your friend.And your friend has ways in which he or she likes to be notified.Maybe they want to get an instant message.Maybe they want to get a piece of email.Maybe they want to get paged.Maybe they want to get called.How would you write today, how would you use the Internet to write a program that accomplished that?

Well, youd have to have the travel booking Web site would have to know how to talk to your contacts list, so it could recognize your friend.It would have to know how to talk to your friends email, personal agent, contact management system so that it would know how to find your friend and notify your friend when your flight is late.Oh, it would probably want to talk to your friends calendar, so it could just note on your friends calendar what your initial arrival time is, et cetera.

So youve got calendars communicating with travel sites, communicating with email programs, communicating with instant messaging just to make a basic scenario work.

Medical records, another good example of where I think the next generation Internet comes together.Today if you wanted to get your full medical record, what would you do?I dont know what I would do frankly.I mean, Id go see my doctor and he would give me what he had, and then he would remind me that, “Oh, by the way, when you got your throat surgery after Comdex Canada three years ago, you know, you got that in a different clinic; we dont have any of your throat surgery records.” And then Id go there and theyd remind me, “Well, yeah, of course, thats okay, but remember when you got sick when you were home in Detroit a few years ago?We dont have any of those records.” And it would be a mess.

In this world of software Web site talking to Web siteIm going to have a Web site someday that is my healthcare record.And I will tell doctors and clinics that they are allowed to update my record on my behalf.I will give permission to my orthopedic doctor to look at my old x-rays.And I will not give him permission to look at my — I dont know — psychiatric records or whatever one I want to keep off limits.(Laughter.)Not that I have a psychiatric record — (laughter) — but just in case.

This is the world that we see evolving to in the next generation of the Internet.These are worlds in which the technology Internet changes fundamentally, but so does the business model.The business model of todays Internet is you own eyeballs and you own everything about the user and people pay a tremendous amount of money to get access to eyeballs.This is a world where you discover Web sites.This is a world where the user is back in control, not the producer of the Web site.Its quite different.

In this next generation well need to see continued improvements in operational excellence.The scale of Web sites will continue to grow.With MSN and Microsoft.com today we do run the most trafficked sites on the Internet worldwide.And I can tell you the amount of effort that we need to put into enhancing the tools to manage and deploy Web site s at scale is still quite large.

The range of devices that people use to access the Internet will continue to grow.

The user interface to the Internet will change.Today we think about accessing the Internet through a browser.Well, for years weve had users complaining about the PC user interface.People want to be able to talk to their computers.People want natural language.They want to be able to express themselves the way they express themselves in their native language:English, French, whatever it is.They want to be able to express themselves.They dont want to have to know its “File” “Open” , blah, blah.They just want to say, “Get me all the information about” or “get me the stats on last nights All Star Game.” They want to be able to express that simply.And well see the user interface evolve.

Thats also necessary if we want to make these other devices worthwhile.Believe me, a cell phones not going to be a great device to access the Internet if everything has to be through sort of todays traditional user interface paradigm.

About three weeks ago we introduced the Microsoft .NET platform, and the role and goal of our .NET platform is to provide the tool, the building blocks, the platform that helps underpin this next generation Internet experience.It involves a new user interface paradigm.It involves technology, which we put in all of our operating systems — Windows, Windows servers, technology that we will work with third parties to put on various forms of UNIX to make it easy to write XML applications.It involves new Internet services that run up in the sky and are available to software developers.

Just take the following simple problem.When you log into the Internet today or when you travel the Internet today, how many different passwords do you have to remember?I dont know for the average person, but when my wife, whos not a techno aficionado, had to learn a password in order to find out what the status was of the tickets to the Hall and Oates concert that she had bought on Ticketmaster, a password she to this day doesnt know where she wrote it down, we have a problem here.The world of the future is a world, and one of the problems we try to address in .NET is how do you create a service so that a user can authenticate themselves once and then travel the Internet and have that credential log them in, authenticate them, authenticate them for payment? How do you create a set of services so that I as a user might describe heres how I want to be contacted and notified?And if my bank balance is below $100, I want to be notified in this way.Or if my test results come back from school, heres how I want to be notified.You want to be able to get notifications on a broad set of things in your life consolidated and presented to you through one scheme.

And so we see an opportunity to create a platform.Its not a platform exactly in the Windows sense.Windows is a platform for building applications for clients and servers.But its a platform that runs on clients, on servers, on new devices.It might run on UNIX systems.And actually runs out in the Internet cloud and provides services that underpin these notions of software as a service, new user interface paradigms, and XML as a new programming model.

I dont think this is something that sort of changes the world overnight.But youll start to see us bring products out that support the .NET vision.This week down in Orlando, Florida were having our annual big conference for software developers.And most of what were talking about is the development tools and operating system runtimes that support this .NET platform, starting with our new release of Visual Studio, which will be out about a year from now.So were working down at the low level on the standards.We and IBM and others are driving XML standards on the tools and operating system runtimes like Visual Studio.

And at the level of building blocks were starting with things like our Passport authentication and identity system, which is built into Hotmail and some of our MSN properties, but which were opening up for developers to use for general authentication on the Internet.

I talked about some of these examples:travel, healthcare.You can think of a lot of other examples in which this next generation of the Internet is valuable.Suppose youre a business thats trying to plan manufacturing of a given item, and you want to be able to go in and find out how much your dealers and distributors have in stock.You want your Web site to talk to their Web site.You want your Web site to talk to your suppliers Web site.These are all important characteristics of this next generation of the Internet.

In this next generation — actually in this generation of the Internet we also will see a change in the way Web sites are constructed.Today a lot of Web sites have one or two big backbone systems, and if they go down the whole site is shut down.And weve seen some major outages on big Web sites in the Internet.Weve seen Schwab be down.Weve seen e-Bay be down.And generally when these systems go down its because they have a single point of failure, a big UNIX or a big mainframe type system that goes down.

Now, you might say, “Hey, this guys trying to act like Windows systems never go down.” (Laughter.)Nah.They do go down sometimes, Ill be the first to admit.But in the new world of Internet operations what youll have is farms of servers, and if one of them goes down youre okay because other members of the farm, the Web site farm, other machines pick up the load.

So when you look at these big Web sites that have problems its never because a Windows machine went down, because theyre almost always a group of Windows machines that are cooperating in the processing.They avoid a single point of failure.

And so the architecture of the future for availability reasons, for reliability reasons, for scalability reasons will really be groups of servers, groups of inexpensive servers acting as a single system as opposed to big single unitary machines that can go down.

Now those groups, those farms of servers will give great scalability and performance.Theyll give higher reliability because there is no single point of failure.Those servers have to support this XML protocol to the core so that they can be programmed and scripted and managed, so that they can serve up XML data to other Web sites.They will have to federate with other services on the Web through XML.My calendar will talk to your calendar.I will be able to book an appointment on both of our calendars and have that work seamlessly because there is a common schema for how XML is represented on the Internet.

And these Web sites will need to be managed from anywhere and scale from very small organizations, from the home even, on up to the largest enterprise.

One of the areas of I think greatest work will be in what we call residential gateways.Most homes — my prediction — ten years from now will have multiple intelligent devices hooked to the Internet, two or three PCs, two or three set-top boxes, a phone or two.Youll have a wireless LAN in your home.And youll have a gateway.The gateway may be one of your set-top boxes.It may be one of your PCs.Or it may be a specialized gateway device that you just use to share the high bandwidth linkage of the home.

So even in the home there will be a server that someone is, quote, “operating.” In my opinion the operations of that server wont be done by the family.Theyll typically be devices, which are remotely managed by the person who sells you your high bandwidth access to the home.But the whole nature of server operations in this next generation must evolve.

Everybody focuses in on the fact that theres going to be new devices and more devices, non-PC devices hooked into the next generation of the Internet.The thing that a lot of people miss is the PC will still be the most important device hooked to the Internet.We believe that strongly at Microsoft.Will there be a higher growth rate in phones and TVs connected to the Internet than PCs?Sure.Just because today we already have over 300 million PCs connected to the Internet, which dwarfs the number of these other devices.So the PC will stay a primary device, but we certainly dont deny that people will use dumb terminals.People will use cell phones.People will use set-top boxes.And there will be a variety of devices that you want to use depending on who you are, where you are and what form.

I see a number of people sitting in the office with pads of paper, maybe making a note or two.You know, my prediction is within ten years youll carry not a notebook even.The notebook is a little bit big.Its got a keyboard.Its a little bit bulky.Youll carry something thats about the size of a piece of paper, about this size, a little thicker.Well call it a Tablet PC.And youll literally sit there and write on your Tablet PC.If you want my presentation, my presentation will be beamed via wireless Internet here in the room.If you want to comment on it, you want to make your own notes and annotations, youll make it right on the slides, right on the tablet, right in the room.If I decide I dont like the way something looks — well, I probably wont do it in this audience — Id sit here and type, youd get it live in real time in a sense in this room.It will be a very different kind of device.

And some of you will want that.Some of you will want a small device that fits in your pocket.Some of you will still want to carry a cell phone and will want to have that be the only device that you carry.

So there will be a variety of form factors from very small phones, screen phones, what we call Pocket PCs, Tablet PCs, notebook machines that have full keyboards.The range of devices that you carry, that you use in your living room, in your family room will continue to evolve quite rapidly.

And were doing investment in a lot of areas.Our new Pocket PC hit the market a couple of months ago.If you havent looked at it, its a super device.We still dont have the cheapest device in the market, but if you really want a powerful thing that fits in your pocket, where you can carry your music, the pictures of your children, all the maps youd ever want, your email, your contacts list, your to-do list, its a super nice device.Its a general purpose, programmable computer.And it has all the benefits of that.

Weve announced earlier this year our Xbox videogame console, which again is another smart device that can plug in, a very powerful device for the family room context.

Were working very aggressively with Rogers up here in Canada on next generation TV set-top boxes.

We announced a new phone type with Samsung, an intelligent phone a few weeks ago.

And at our .NET launch several weeks ago we showed the first prototypes of these tablet PCs.

So across the board were making a big investment not only in the PC, but in these new devices as part of this next generation of the Internet.

Ive expressed my enthusiasm already for the PC as a device.Why do I think it has such a bright future?Well, PCs have amazing power and performance and price.They really do.And if you want a general purpose device, a device that can do a lot of things, that has the most capability of any device you have in your home, the PC will always be the most capable device.

Were working very hard on making the PC also the most reliable device.Its not that today, but for those of you who perhaps have already migrated your desktops to Windows 2000 you know that were making great strides forward on reliability.The PC, because of its general purpose nature, has been less reliable than some special purpose devices.We can fix that.Were doing a lot of work, and certainly I encourage everybody to take a look at the Windows 2000 desktop.

PCs today sometimes people say theyre too hard to manage.Well, weve made a lot of investment again in making it possible to centrally manage these machines.In fact, over time I think youll be able to buy services in the next generation of the Internet.Youll be able to buy services where somebody says, “Ill take care of your PC in your house.You buy it.You buy the service from me.Ill install all the new software.Ill manage your PC.Ill keep it up to date for you.Ill do that all via the Internet.Just pay me five bucks a month.” And so well get out of a mode where people worry about managing and keeping their own PCs up to date.

Flat panel screens are becoming more common.People do like large screens.As much as I like the TV and as much as I like things that fit in my pocket, Im getting a little older.I like these big screens where I can see things.

I talked about the tablets.Multimedia is an area in which well I think continue to see the PC be on the leading edge.Whether its for video or audio or music or movies, the PC will be leading edge.

The initial broadband connectivity that most people get will be through the PC as opposed to one of these other devices.And these devices are designed to be expandable in a broad set of ways.

We did a little video that Ill admit this time in advance is designed to be a little bit cute.But its kind of a scene that you might expect in the world of the next generation of the Internet.But the scenario that youll see is a scenario that very much depends upon the PC as one of the core devices.Other devices are involved, but the rich things that our heroine for this video, Jenna, can do, she can only do if she has a PC.

So why dont we roll the video and sort of take a look at what the next generation PC might look like.

(Video segment.)

(Applause.)

What were trying to give you a sense of in the video is some of the amazing scenarios that we are very focused in on enabling through next generations of technology.If you take a look at the kind of video editing and project sharing that the girls were doing in this video, theyre things where you are really going to want the power, the processing capability, intelligence of a PC, the screen size of the PC.

So we see the PC as staying a vital and exciting device.We showed you a little bit of what the tablet PC kind of functionality might look like, and still there are other devices.She can plug that cassette into something in her car.It can talk to her.So there are a variety of devices.But the PC stays really sort of the showcase device for the general purpose, high-end things that people want to do.

…

The future user interface I talked about as being essential in this next generation of the Internet.I see a lot of things changing.We talk about the notion of authentication.We talk about natural user interface where I can express myself.I say, “Get me all the information on my last trip to Canada.” Ill want to see the presentations.The computer will be smarter about recognizing the intent of what I say.

We talk about the information agents, the thing that will help me customize who can access me electronically, when and how.

We talk about the notion of access to information anywhere.I should be able to call from my phone — Im sure many people have gone through the painful experience of calling somebody on the phone.You dont know their extension number.And youve got to try to type in using the keypad some semblance of their name.You really just want to be able to say, you know, “Im looking for Dave Smith” and you want to be able to get to Dave Smith.And you want to be able to perhaps call in over your phone and get your email read back to you.It involves access with speech, with voice, with handwriting recognition as a built-in piece.

Well show you some things in a demonstration a minute from now where we talk about the notion of a universal canvas.Today you still have to think about these applications being separate, even though we allow you to move information between applications.We talk about the notion of a universal canvas.

We talk about the notion of smart tags.Today if you get a document, you just get the document.The document doesnt try to intelligently help you understand it.In the future if you see a document and the documents got a name of a business embedded in it, youll right click on it, it will say, “What do you want:its financial results?Do you want to go to its home page?” It will recognize intelligently the context and the items inside the document and tag them for you.

…

With the move that we see forward, with more devices becoming popular attached to the Internet, with the continued success of the PC, with the growth in e-commerce, and with the move to hopefully .NET, but certainly the next generation Internet, these are going to be exciting times.And the opportunity for all of us to benefit, to do new things, to start exciting businesses, to participate in exciting projects I think is absolutely incredible, and certainly at Microsoft we look forward to providing you with some of the important technology to drive the next phase of our mutual revolution, and we look forward to having that opportunity with many of you here in the room today.

I appreciate your time and attention, and enjoy Comdex, Windows World, Network+Interop and even that last show, whose name I cant quite remember right now.(Laughter.)Thank you all very much.

(Applause.)

END

Steve Ballmer’s view seven and half months after the .NET announcement was that of the of the original .NET vision, so he didn’t that by his August 6, 2010 decision the original vision could not be delivered:Steve Ballmer Speech Transcript – DevCon 2001 [Feb 6, 2011]
2001 Windows Embedded Developer Conference

…

The other item which I think it will be increasingly critical not only in the embedded space, but across the full gamut of things that we and you do, is this notion of integration. And I want to talk a little bit about that in more detail, because I think it’s one of the most important trends we expect to see in the market overall. And that’s the evolution from a world of what I would call reasonably unconnected applications, and devices, and services, to a world of reasonably connected devices and services and applications. Whether we’re talking about the PC, the PC and the Internet, or embedded devices, we’re sort of going through a third phase of evolution.

The first phase was a phase in which everything was pretty much an island. And if you think back even 10 or 15 years, that was the basic world in which we lived. There might be some primitive upload of information, but devices were essentially islands and embedded devices were essentially islands. Over the last 10 years, both because of the sort of sweep in popularity of networking, and the advent of the Internet, we’ve gotten into a second phase in which these devices are connected, but the nature of the connection is not very rich. The devices, the applications, they don’t really know much about one another. They can’t communicate with one another in a very rich way.

Phase three, the phase that I think we’re entering into now for the computer industry as a whole, is a world in which you have smart devices, smart clients, and smart servers, smart applications talking to each other in a very intelligent way, where you actually can pass data at the semantic level, as opposed to just sending bits back and forth.

Why do I think this kind of integration is very important? I think the trends and the transformation that are happening on the Internet today highlight that quite a bit. If you want to put together an application on the Internet today, let’s forget the specifics of embedded, but just an application, and that application is supposed to ‑‑ what’s a good example, Myskivacation.com. Myskivacation.com is going to let me book a flight, it’s going to let me notify whoever is picking me up that I’m coming, put it on their calendar, tell them when I’m late, or my flight is late, they should be automatically paged. It’s going to tell the U.S. Postal service to please hold my mail, it’s going to automatically enter me into the computer system at the Vail ski resort where I’m going to visit, and it’s going to be repopulated, so if I take that lift ticket from last year, that I haven’t paid any additional money against it will automatically update it and put it in the system. That’s the application I want to build, Myskivacation.com. And it’s got to talk to these intelligent devices, and it’s got to talk to other Web sites.

It’s a very sensible application to want to write. It’s a very impossible application to write today, really. How do you tell the U.S. Postal Service, I’m an application acting on behalf of Steve Ballmer, he really trusts me, and are you programmable so I can tell you to hold the mail? I don’t know how you start on that problem. How do you actually write an application that can put something on somebody else’s calendar with any degree of security and reliability, without writing your own calendar system? Very hard to do. How do you tap into the notification system, whether it’s paging or instant messaging, however people like to be contacted? It’s very hard to do. How do you have enough intelligence in the Web sites at Vail so that you can talk to them programmatically and say, Steve is coming back, give him credit in the computer system, we’ll take care of the payments. It’s very hard to do.

And what we need is an infrastructure that supports that kind of rich communication between devices and people, if you will. We need an infrastructure that supports that, from PCs to servers, to cell phones, to set top boxes, to other intelligent devices. That’s the software infrastructure of the future. And if I ask myself, or we ask ourselves at Microsoft, what’s the world look like in 10 years, we’re not going to be writing programs the way we write programs today. We’re not going to all just sort of write to the metal. There needs to be a higher level of infrastructure that kind of sits in the middle of that. And as we’ve thought about it, we say basically, this represents a new platform, a new software platform, a platform that’s got to be part of the PC, it’s got to be part of the server, it’s got to be part of a variety of smart devices, and this platform has to also sort of just live out in the Internet cloud.

Take the case where I want Myskivacation.com to represent me to the Postal Service. There needs to be an authority out there that we can all trust to securely validate my identity, that needs to exist at the cloud-based part of the platform. So this next generation, what we call our instantiation is the .NET platform, has to live in a variety of places. Now, if you go back five years we’d probably say that if it lived in the PC and the PC server that would be enough. It is quite clear that in this day and age as important a device as the PC will be, other devices are very important. And you cannot approach ‑‑ we could not approach Vail, we could not approach Bally’s with our partners, we couldn’t approach the XFL, we can’t approach anybody unless there’s ways to get information at the semantic level to move through this platform, out of these smart devices and into the rest of the applications infrastructure that people build. That’s very, very, very important.

And so six months ago, eight months ago we launched this .NET platform. And we talk about the components that can be ‑‑ that will be part of Windows, that will be embeddable in other devices, the services, identify, notification, storage, that we will host, and allow others to host out in the Internet cloud, and then the infrastructure, the application frameworks, the servers, et cetera, that people can use to build the back end application that pulls this all together. We’re launching this year a development tool, VisualStudio.NET, that brings the fundamental programming infrastructure, and this whole environment has embraced XML, and the SOAP protocol that we developed with IBM and the standards bodies to move XML information, XML payloads across the Internet, and preserve the semantic content of what people want to move.

So I do think there’s a new world emerging of smart devices. That is the future of computing. We are trying to respond with a platform that helps you mobilize and develop, and deliver these kinds of rich devices, smart devices instantaneously. And some of it will have to do with integration, some of it will have to do with presentation, as we saw in the case of Bally’s and the XFL.

To try to bring this to life for you, I want to show you a short video that we made to kind of demonstrate the application scenarios that we think will be important in the future, and how some of those may come about. So we’ll just show you a brief demonstration in the life of Steve Masters, an accident prone man who is just looking for smart devices and smart infrastructure to help him in the modern world.

Roll the video please.

(Video shown.)

This is the second video already embedded into this post, which focussed very much on the essence that was not delivered even when the original .NET program was practically closed in February 2008. This was the so called “Steve Masters video” at the time of Microsoft .NET introduction in June-July 2000 and used to represent the important web services concept even afterwards.

MR. BALLMER: Steve may have problems, but those intelligent devices sure helped him a lot. The phone that maintains information about his position, a phone from which he can plug into the services in the cloud and give up personal information, pay for things, about himself. The smart card and the intelligence in that device. The X-ray imaging system built with the right kind of intelligent technology to provide information released from the smart device. This is the kind of world in which we’re moving. And the only devices I think that will make sense as we get into the future are devices that are smart, that do plug in, that do connect into this infrastructure. And if they have an end user connection, they really are smart devices about me. They store or allow me to access information about my personal preferences and data, my schedule, my contacts, whatever the case may be. The experience has to scale. There’s an appropriate user interface that scales from very small screens, from low resolution screens on to much larger screens like the one we saw on the Bally’s Gaming machine.

These devices need to be smart about other devices. They have to be able to announce themselves to other devices across the network. They have to be able to say what services they export, and they have to be able to discover other services provided by other devices that are participating in the scenario, in the solution that is relevant. Connectivity, we’re going to move, people are going to increasingly move these devices around. And the infrastructure has to be smart about quality of service, and deciding at what bandwidth and what capabilities to provide the user at different bandwidth.

One of the big issues we’re facing right now with the Pocket PC is the right thing for the Pocket PC, the right thing for these Tablet PC devices that were demonstrated in a video that we’re working on, the right thing for cell phones, is for them to be able to move seamlessly from a corporate broadband network connection out into the narrowband public network and back without people having to reconfigure and change them, so that when I’m at Microsoft, for example, my cell phone, my Pocket PC, should use our high bandwidth 802.11 network. But when I roam out into the world at large, that same device should be able to use the cellular radio network that is available for connectivity, and still have the applications all participate in intelligent ways. And I think the same case could be made for a variety of these new smart devices.

And last, but certainly not least, the software infrastructure that you want to have available to you as an application developer in these devices gets richer and richer. You shouldn’t have to worry about your own networking. You shouldn’t have to worry about your own management of people’s personal preferences, and some of their core data, payment, identity, et cetera. You shouldn’t have to worry about basic infrastructure that allows you to create inside the smart device a Web service that talks to other devices.

And so I think if you think in the context of the video we showed you or some of the scenarios, the smart device will be increasingly the norm, and we see that in the consumer market where, let me call them home peripherals, stereos, stereo replacements, jukeboxes, home server appliances are becoming popular. We see that in the case of special purpose devices for entertainment, recreation, some of the kinds of devices we saw here. We certainly see them in the industrial field, whether we’re talking about devices that people use in the warehouse, in the shop floor, that the salesmen use as they travel, all of these devices are going to need to have the kind of richness and smarts built in that I talk about here, and that we saw in the video.

As we talk about the infrastructure, the software infrastructure and plumbing for people to build applications, in some senses there’s a lot of services, multimedia services, graphics services, communications services that are very important. But the core programming is perhaps the most important. How do you create a device that is smart, that communicates easily with other devices, and how do you create a set of applications for that device that can appropriately and intelligently integrate their information elsewhere. I think the core really builds on the so-called XML technology that has become so important. How do you create an application that creates an XML payload, that passes it to other devices in an intelligent way, what are the protocols for moving that around, what’s the machinery that lets you create an application, that exposes itself and allows itself to be programmed via XML and SOAP very comfortably, and how do you do that with a kind of productivity that you will insist on as a developer. And really the target of our .NET application frameworks and VisualStudio.NET for the PC and the target for what we call our .NET frameworks, these can be put on other operating systems that can be embedded into smart devices, whether it’s a Windows CE device, or perhaps something that’s even thinner that you might want to put in the marketplace. They allow you to build this new-style Web service application very conveniently, and still have access to the range of today’s Windows applications services, streaming media, graphics, whatever the case may be.

And what I would like to do now is invite up on stage with me Rob Brigham. Rob works in our VisualStudio.NET group, and we want to give you a little bit of a sense of what you can do in terms of application development with the new VisualStudio.NET, the .NET frameworks, and the Compact frameworks, which will ship later this year. Please welcome Rob Brigham.

(Applause.)

MR. BRIGHAM: Thanks, Steve.

So one of the tenets of .NET is having access to information any time, any place, from any device. But when you look at a lot of the cool Web sites out there where you can check stock quotes, track the packages that you send, or buy things, they all require the use of a Web browser. And when you’re using a non-PC device, using a Web browser is usually not the thing that you want to do. So, if we can take these existing Web pages and transform them into Web services that we can program against, then you, the developer, can control how you interact with the site. You can do so in the manner most efficient for your particular application or device.

Let’s take a look at an example of doing that.

MR. BALLMER: Key to XML is essentially moving back away from presentations of the underlying semantics of the Web site, and then letting the smart device deal with the semantics instead of the presentation.

MR. BRIGHAM: Exactly, you just want access to the data.

MR. BALLMER: Great.

MR. BRIGHAM: So, here is MSN Photo Center, and this is a Web site that allows users to store their digital images online. Currently, the only way that users can upload their photos is through this Web page here, so you need a Web browser to do this. They want to fix this, and they want to do so by creating a Web service that allows any device, or any application to upload their photos to Photo Center.

MR. BALLMER: You mean, for example, if I was on vacation and I didn’t want to take my PC with me, heaven forbid, I could just directly upload off my digital camera?

MR. BRIGHAM: Exactly, yes. You don’t have to tote that laptop with you.

MR. BALLMER: Not that I wouldn’t want to take my laptop everywhere, but keep going.

MR. BRIGHAM: So, we’re going to do so in VisualStudio.NET, and what I have open here is the VisualBasic.NET Web project, and in it we have Web pages, and we also have Web services. So, if we go to a Web service, and we look at the code for it, we see that this code is just like the code you write for local components. It’s a class, and it has public functions in it. So, if we go down to the bottom, here’s that upload photo method. And this method just takes some photo information here, the name, the image, and then it’s going to call some database commands to insert that image into the database. Now, all that we have to do to make this public function exposed as a Web service, is add a Web method attribute to it. And that’s it. VisualStudio.NET and the framework is going to do everything that we need to expose this. So, we can build this project, and run the Web service, and we’ll see that we hit that Web service URL without invoking a method on it.

It’s going to automatically generate a description page for us. And on this page, we can see things like the methods that are available, the parameters that they take, and you can even invoke a method straight from this page. So it’s a great way to test out your Web services as you’re developing it.

We’re going to invoke the GetPhotoAlbums method, and you’ll see when we make this Web service call, it’s just an http request, so we can see we passed the method name and any parameter values with that http request. And what we get back is just XML data, even the binary photo images are encoded inside the XML. So this means that any device can now call this Web service. And that’s what we’re going to do next. We’re going to build an application that’s going to call this Web service.

So, I have a digital camera, and I use it all the time, I really love it, but the one thing that really bugs me is, as you said, when you go on vacation, you’re kind of tied to your laptop as well, and you have to take that with you, because the flash memory card fills up, and you have to upload the images. So that’s a real hassle. So, I want to try to help the digital camera users out by creating a kiosk, and this could be a photo upload kiosk that could be installed at tourist locations, so that as people are taking a lot of pictures, they can go to one of these kiosks, and then upload their images to the Web so they can delete their memory.

So, here’s my kiosk app, and in it I have an upload form. So if we go down to the bottom of this form there is an upload to Web button and when users click on this button we want to call that Web service. So before we can call that Web service we need to reference it from this client application. So to do so we can go to the add Web reference dialogue. And what this allows us to do is browse the Web and find out which Web sites are publishing services. So if we go to Photo Center…

MR. BALLMER: And this uses the UDDI discovery protocol for services on the Web.

MR. BRIGHAM: Correct. So if we go back here there’s even a link to UDDI. And you can go to a service directory like UDDI and see a bunch of available Web services out there. So we’re actually going straight to the Photo Center site here, and we can see the service they expose. And it shows up in the right hand side here we can add a reference to it, straight from this dialogue, and now we’re going to get a Web reference in Visual Studio, that means we can now call that Web service just like it was a local component. So we’re going to write that code now, we’re going to create a new instance of the Web service, and it was photoalbums.photoservice. And now that we have an instance of that Web service we can now call methods on it.

So even though this is a Web service that lives remotely on the Internet, we still get these IntelliSense statements on it. So I can see the methods that are available on the service, and then I also get the parameter completion here. So the first thing we need to send is the album ID, so I’ll pass that. The second is the name, and lastly is just the binary image itself. So there’s our Web service call, and we’re done building this client application. It’s now going to call that Web service so we can build and deploy this project now, and now it’s going to deploy it to our photo kiosk which is over there. So we can walk over and run the application on the kiosk.

Okay. So here’s my kiosk application here, and the first thing that I need to do is log in. So I’m going to apply my credentials, and when we sign in here, since this is a smart device, it’s going to authenticate me with the Passport service. And then when it comes back, since it has my identity stored on the device this Photo Center application is going to recognize me and it’s going to automatically pull down my images that I have on the Web site.

So you figure I have some pictures of my daughter, I’ve got pictures of my sock monkey, too, on here. But, what I want to do now is — I just went to the Grand Canyon, I’m out on vacation, I just filled up my camera full of images, and now I want to clear out some memory. So what I’m going to do is go to the upload photos section. And I just need to connect my camera up to the cable, and now that I have that I can download the images from the camera. It’s going to load it up onto the kiosk, and now I can choose things like the destination album that I want to put these photos in, and I can even set the picture names if I want to here. And now that we’re done, here’s that upload to Web button that we just wrote the code for. So when we click this it’s going to call that upload photo method on the Web service, push those binary images to the Web, and now it’s going to refresh my album and we’ll see the pictures that we just uploaded, and they’re down here.

So as you’ve seen here VisualStudio.NET is really going to make both building and consuming Web services very simple.

MR. BALLMER: Some day maybe we’ll have a camera that’s smart enough that you don’t even need to have the kiosk.

MR. BRIGHAM: Exactly. Ideally this would be wireless, and you could just connect up to the network and it would call that photo service directly, that would be ideal.

MR. BALLMER: It would be a smart device for somebody to build. Great. Thanks, Rob.

MR. BRIGHAM: Thank you.

MR. BALLMER: Smart devices with an infrastructure that lets them plug into smart servers and services running elsewhere out in the Internet, that’s the vision of where we go. The third element that is required to make that complete is a set of services, and we gave you kind of a sense of that in the demonstration that Rob just did of services that you can count on running in the Internet cloud, and communicating with these smart devices.

Take identity. We know today there’s a huge problem with people having to log in multiple times, reissuing their personal preferences, personal data, personal information. There needs to be services that exist in the cloud. Certainly, for the .NET frameworks we are building a set of fundamental services to support these applications, identity, payments, notification, storage. Some of these will be services that we run, some of these will be services that we run and our customers can run, and they confederate together, so that you can issue somebody an identify and federate in with, for identification purposes, the community of people which we already have almost 100 million on the Internet today who have identities, who have names, and who have a way for us to authenticate them across the Internet.

So some of these services are applications you will build. Some of these things are services that you can call from your application. I don’t want to authenticate this user, I will let somebody else authenticate this user, a service being run out in the cloud. What we showed you here essentially was a storage service. The photo work uses the basic XML storage infrastructure that we’ll put in place. And our own MSN sites will be able to run that, but so would any other service that wants to plug in and be available as another service out in the Internet for people to use.

I think there will be a variety of business models for these services. Some people will charge for them, some people will provide them free of charge in order to build a larger community of users for other things that they are doing. Microsoft, we have some core services, like authentication and notification, which we will provide to developers essentially at a very low fee. And then we will ourselves build a set of communications services, and sophisticated user interface that uses those services so that the community of users just continues to grow and build from the base of people that we have involved today. But, this set of services is an important element. If everybody is creating a new identity for people the whole notion of smart devices that know about your data and your preferences starts to eviscerate fairly quickly.

I talked earlier about how we’re putting skin in the game, that we’re working on some smart devices beyond the PC itself. Our Pocket PC is a very good example of that, based on Windows CE, and I’ll admit we got off to a little bit of a slow start, but we’re really at full throttle right now. This is a device that I would expect us to sell something above 4 million units in the course of the next 12 months, and it has really ramped up.

Stinger is a next-generation smart phone builds off of Windows CE and the Pocket PC code base. Car.NET is a product that builds off of Windows CE, that we’ve licensed to a number of the high-end automotive manufacturers to provide in car navigation and entertainment systems. Xbox builds off of Windows NT embedded, which will be available ‑‑ and Xbox will be available later this year. The Microsoft TV, and Ultimate TV set top boxes, both the platform, as well as the Ultimate TV product, which we’re delivering with Direct TV this month, all build off of the Windows CE embedded technology, which we make available.

And just as you give us feedback, every one of these efforts also provides feedback to our core embedded operating systems group on things that we need to do different and better. We’re not asking you to make a bet that we’re not willing to make in force ourselves. If you look at the size of some of these bets, of Xbox the amount of investment we’re putting in there, in the Pocket PC and mobility space, or in the television space, we’re making huge bets on the quality of our own embedded technologies for these smart devices.

What does the future look like for us in the embedded space? Today at the platform level we offer Windows CE 3.0, and NT 4 embedded. And you see a list of some of the devices we have, and we’re in beta with the next generation of tools. As this year completes we’ll introduce a new version of Windows CE called Talisker, which I’ll talk about in a minute. We’ll introduce the embedded version of Windows XP, or Whistler, which I’ll talk about in a minute, and a range of upgrades and new devices are coming. In addition to final production shipment of the .NET infrastructure that I had a chance to show with Rob earlier, and these .NET Compaq frameworks, which will be embeddable both on CE, and again, as I said, on non-CE devices. We’re already in discussions with a number of people about moving the .NET Compaq frameworks to some other environments.

Talisker is the next release of Windows CE. It provides for greater componentization, so you can really get just what you want, and optimize around smaller footprints. We have very good networking support built in, UPnP, Bluetooth, 802.11. We’ve done a lot to make the user interface more flexible, the UI is now skinnable, and we’ve built in support for our ClearType font set. And I think it’s really a very important step forward. The readability of these new fonts on very small screens is incredibly improved, on LCD screens. And I think it will really make a difference in terms of the kind of readability you get on small screen devices.

We’re building in our latest Web and multimedia support. There’s a set of new things that we’ll do to improve the development environment and the operating systems support for good application development. And we are starting the process of building on the infrastructure I talked about, the authentication and notification services in the cloud, XML and SOAP support, the common language run time out of the .NET frameworks. And this will be available by the end of this year.

As part of that, or related to that, we’re also announcing today the Windows Embedded Strategic Silicon Alliance. This is a partnership that we’re putting in place with a variety of people who provide microprocessors and microprocessor instructions to optimize Windows CE and the Windows CE kernel for their processors.

We’re trying to make sure that you can leverage the latest processor innovation and allow for deep collaboration between us and those partners, people like Intel and NEC, like Arm and Phillips, and TI and Hitachi, you can read the list of some of the other partners. I think this is a very important step forward in terms of really making sure the Windows CE software and the platform, the hardware platforms on which you’re building are very, very well optimized together.

In the Windows NT world, we have taken an approach in the past that I would call highly suboptimal. We have built Windows, and then after it was done, we’ve gone and injected the technology for embedding. That’s why we’re sitting here today, and we only give you Windows NT 4 embedded. Embedding was kind of an afterthought. And we think it is very important for us to move this process of letting you embed NT up to a fundamental characteristic of the product. So with the next release of Windows, which we now call Windows XP, that’s the name, we are building the technology that allows for componentization and targeting, et cetera, into the core development of the product. So that within 90 days after the release of any new version of Windows, we’ll be able to give you all of the tools to allow you to componentize and embed that in a smart device.

We’ve taken huge steps from where we are today with you with NT 4. First Windows 2000, and then Windows XP takes a huge step forward on top of that. And the fact of the matter is, I think when you take a look at it, there’s a lot of technologies which we simply don’t allow you to embed today in a smart device, because we’re back on the NT 4 platform. So, greater speed, systematic deliver of the technologies which will allow you to embed, and faster release times.

The other thing which we’ve done in the Windows XP embedded environment is to allow you to embed smaller components. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from this audience that you need better componentization, smaller footprints in the NT world, and we think we’re taking some very good steps in that direction.

In addition, in the XP embedded release, there is a set of things that we’ve done explicitly for the embedded market. Number one, we have execute in place as part of that operating system release. We have full headless support as part of the Windows XP release, and we have support for the Compaq PCI technologies as part of the Windows XP embedded release. So not only do you get all the new capabilities since NT 4, but some specific capabilities that we’ve been getting pushed on from the embedded community.

We also provide a better tool set, both for target designing, target analysis, and component designing to let you be more efficient and effective in the work that you’re doing. And, of course, because Windows XT has embraced XML and SOAP and UDDI, some of the core infrastructure protocols and standards and technologies that we talked about, this release will get you there.

Our target is to ship Windows XP in the fall of this year, and within 90 days of fall to have the embedded version available for you.

I hope that at the end of the session there’s a few things that are clear to you. Number one, we have a vision for where we think the computer industry is going, and what that means specifically for the embedded market.

Number two, we’re trying to enable a next generation platform, .NET, that enables you to build Web services, the application type of the future, in all of these smart devices. I think it’s fair for me to say, we have a proven expertise in software, and if software matters, if this stuff really does involve giving you an infrastructure that’s rich, I think we’re the best place to turn. The development tools we give you have been and will continue to be best of breed. We’re trying to build a platform between CE and Windows NT that will span the broadest set of devices. We’re committed to this market for the long-run. We’re building significant businesses, like Xbox and our mobility business, and our TV business, on top of the same infrastructurethat we’re encouraging you to bet on.

And last, but certainly not least, we view this as a partnership. We know you’ll need our help. We know we need your feedback. We know there’s going to be technical support challenges, go to market challenges. When our partner at Scans has an idea that they and the XFL are interested in, sometimes those really require a strong three-way partnership to make happen. And so we encourage you to push on us, to lean on us, to talk to Bill, BillV at Microsoft.com. If you need help and support and we’re not giving it to you, I’m SteveB at Microsoft.com. We’re in this with you for the long-run. We certainly appreciate your spending not only the time with me this morning, but the time here at this conference, and let us know how we can help. Enjoy the rest of the show.

.NET for business

The .NET Framework provides a comprehensive and consistent programming model and a common set of APIs spanning Microsoft platforms. From client devices like desktop PCs and smartphones, to the public and private cloud, .NET enables your business to build applications that work the way you want, using a common set of tools across software, services, and devices.

Ready for multiple platforms

.NET encompasses a set of technologies that spans many platforms, including mobile devices, desktop clients, and web services. This provides your business with broad reach across Microsoft platforms. In addition, .NET Compact Framework and .NET Micro Framework (now open source) extend that reach even further into smaller-footprint devices.Multiple Platform Support › [July 12, 2012]

Customer examples

Why more companies are migrating from Java to .NET

An in-depth analysis of a growing industry trendDownload the Java to .NET Migration white paper ›
[Marketing Trends & Key Benefits White Paper as of June 7, 2011: the result of a research project by Pique Solutions to identify trends and gain insights into development platform migrations]

.NET is a set of technologies that spans many platforms including mobile devices, desktop clients, and web services. In addition, .NET Compact Framework and .NET Micro Framework (now open source) extend that reach even further into smaller-footprint devices.

Desktop Client

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a next-generation system for building Windows client applications with visually stunning user experiences. With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications. WPF is included in the Microsoft .NET Framework, so you can build applications that incorporate other elements of the .NET Frameworkclass library.

WPF provides powerful controls and advanced features such as layout, databinding and templating to build visually rich, powerful applications.

Development and maintenance costs are reduced because XAML markup is not tightly coupled with behavior-specific code.

Development is more efficient because designers can implement an application’s appearance simultaneously with developers building in .NET.

Micro Framework

The .NET Micro Framework is the smallest version of .NET for very resource-constrained devices. It offers a complete and innovative development and execution environment that brings the productivity of modern computing tools to embedded programming. Even though it’s offered under an Open Source License (Apache 2.0) it is still under active development inside Microsoft in coordination with active community contributions.

Develop the endpoints of your solution for connected devices using the same tools that are used on the servers and in the cloud.

Learn more about .NET Micro Framework at NETMF.COM › [.NET Micro Framework microsite [Aug 9, 2012] with link to the NETFM Open Source Site [May 17, 2012] on which the current dowloadable version is .NET MF 4.2 as of Aug 14, 2012. The latest information as of Sept 12, 2012: “We are in the final stages of version 4.3 of NETMF with release in the near future. This release will work with Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop. In addition, we are in the planning stages for .NET Gadgeteer version 4.3 and this version will also support that Express edition. We don’t have a firm release target for that at this time.”]

Compact Framework

The Microsoft .NET Compact Framework enables you to build and run managed applications and use Web services. The .NET Compact Frameworkincludes an optimized common language runtime (CLR) and a subset of the.NET Framework class library, which supports features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Forms. It also contains classes that are designed exclusively for the .NET Compact Framework.

The .NET Compact Framework is a subset of the full .NET Framework.

It implements the Framework class library and also contains features and classes that are specific to mobile and embedded development.

Server / Azure

.NET is the richest and most productive way for developers to create applications on premise (Windows Server) and in the cloud (Windows Azure). It’s also the best way to build first-class back-ends for any device running on any OS (Windows 8, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7).

.NET is the best environment to develop cloud applications spawning the private datacenter and the public cloud.

.NET on the server powers ASP.NET, WIF, Entity Framework and WCF.

.NET provides the best capabilities and framework to enable developers to create next-generation enterprise solutions.

.NET and Visual Studio enable developers to manage all their development tasks in a very productive way.

Create your first application

Implement a simple web site using ASP.NET MVC that supports creating, editing, and listing to-do items from a database. You will learn the basics of using Windows Azure Web Sites, deploying an application to Windows Azure, and storing data in SQL Database.

Implement a simple web application that is hosted in a Windows Azure cloud service. You will learn the basics of deploying an application to Windows Azure and storing data in SQL Database.

Implement a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 and hosted in Windows Azure. You can use Windows Azure Virtual Machines to run any application. Use standalone virtual machines to host .NET applications, or integrate a virtual machine as part of a cloud service.

Learn how you can easily create web applications hosted on Windows Azure that are optimized for rendering on mobile devices.

… Agile Development Platform: The Microsoft Cloud OS allows enterprises to build applications they need using the tools they know, including Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET, or open-source technologies and languages, such as REST, JSON, PHP, and Java. …

… Windows Server is a proven application and web platform—with thousands of applications already built and deployed on the Windows platform, and a community of millions of knowledgeable and skilled developers already in place. The new version of Windows Server will keep bringing innovations to developers and end customers. On Windows Server 2012, applications can run well in virtually any application environment developers choose (for example, .NET languages, Java, PHP, or Python). Windows Server 2012 also offers the flexibility to build and deploy applications and websites across premises on a scalable, elastic, and open web and application platform. …

… Both Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure provide increasing flexibility for building and deploying applications in on-premises and public cloud environments. Windows Server 2012 offers programming languages and tools, such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET Framework, that span on-premises and cloud environments. With these tools, developers can work in a single, unified environment to build solutions for Windows Server and Windows Azure cloud platforms. Developers can use these programming tools across web, application, and data tiers for locally deployed applications and for private and public cloud solutions. They provide the ability to use the same development model between Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure to create on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid applications. …

…

Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure road maps address the requirements for a modern application development platform by offering an excellent environment to develop cloud applications spawning the private datacenter and the public cloud, and by providing the capabilities and framework to enable developers to create next generation application solutions. Together with Microsoft Visual Studio, the .NET 4.5 framework enables developers to manage all their development tasks in a very productive way.

For example, innovations in .NET 4.5 include new Async language and runtime support: which enables easy development of highly scalable solutions, as it allows to handle high volumes of transactions with Async HTTP. Additional enhancements include increased application speed and startup via background JIT compilation, as well as many new features across ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

Cloud applications are a new type of application that depends on loosely coupled, asynchronous, and data centric capabilities. These typically run on scalable, highly available, and utility designed runtimes and infrastructure that provide higher levels of abstraction from the metal than those previously available. .NET 4.5 is targeted to provide great capabilities for developers working on mobile apps, web apps, and cloud services—while giving rapid scalability support, fast time to market, and handling a gamut of PCs, browsers, and mobiles.

In addition to being the best platform for the .NET framework, Windows Server 2012 provides a single, agile platform for both open-source software and ASP.NET, which allows developers to freely choose from multiple programming stacks and languages, including .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python. Windows Server 2012 also offers enhanced support for PHP and MySQL through IIS 8.0 extensions. IIS can support running both ASP.NET 3.5 and ASP.NET 4.5 applications, and provides support for the latest HTML5 standards and for writing managed WebSocket protocol applications that provide real-time bidirectional client-server communications.

…

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. You can develop apps that will take advantage of all the great features that we have added, including new features in Windows 8. We are also announcing the availability of the .NET Framework 4.5 reference source code, under the Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL).

Improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5

We have made many improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5. Many of these advances help you write better apps with less effort, while others help you target particular Microsoft platforms. In either case, you’ll find the new features useful and relevant for the apps that you write today.

Core runtime and class library improvements

The most important core advance is the new async programming model, which has broad support across the common language runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework base class libraries, and the C#, Visual Basic, and F# languages. In particular, we added hundreds of new Task-returning methods across the .NET Framework libraries.

We made performance improvements in many parts of the core. Given the focus on async, we made the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and other concurrency APIs faster. We also made across-the-board improvements in the CLR, including multicore JIT, MPGO, and big wins in CLR garbage collection. If you are building responsive or scalable systems, or would like to take advantage of multicore and manycore processors, you’ll find this a very exciting release.

Visual Studio 2012 has built-in support for creating portable class libraries, which make it easier to re-use your code across apps built for different platforms.

Windows Store app programming experience for C# and Visual Basic

The .NET Framework 4.5 enables you to create Windows Store apps using C# and Visual Basic. These include both XAML and HTML Apps. This support is based on the work that we did to allow Windows Runtime APIs to be called from managed code. It also includes the new .NET for Windows Store apps API surface area.

You can call Windows Runtime APIs with C# and Visual Basic, and you can also create Windows Runtime APIs with those same languages. This ability is very useful if you want to call managed code within an HTML App or a C++ XAML or DirectX app. As part of this scenario, you can call Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services from within your Windows Runtime API implementation.

We made performance improvements specifically for Windows Store apps. We reduced startup time substantially, updated the garbage collector to aggressively reclaim memory upon app suspension, and created a service to automatically generate native images for your app DLLs. We also improved file I/O performance when using the .NET Framework stream extension methods, which automatically buffer underlying Windows Runtime streams.

ASP.NET

ASP.NET followed the trend of excellent support for async, including async in ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Web API.

ASP.NET 4.5 and Windows 8 added support for the Web Sockets API. The upcoming ASP.NET SignalR provides developers with an ideal high-level abstraction that enables real-time communication not just over Web Sockets, but also transport fallback for older browsers.

ASP.NET Web Forms 4.5 gets a huge upgrade with support not only for strongly typed data controls in all data-bound controls, but also Model Binding, which will greatly simply your Web Forms code-behind files. Web Forms developers can even use ASP.NET Data Controls with the repository pattern. ASP.NET Web Forms also has complete support for HTML5 and CSS3, and takes advantage of the new editor improvements in Visual Studio 2012.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

We made many improvements in WCF, including: better performance, reliability and scale with WebSockets, and support for client-side validation of the server SSL certificate using WCF’s custom X509 certificate validator on a per-request basis.

Entity Framework

Entity Framework now supports enum properties and spatial data types in models created with Code First and the EF Designer. Models created with the EF Designer can now map to Table-Valued Functions (TVFs) in an existing database. We also made significant performance improvements to Entity Framework.

Windows Workflow (WF)

Windows Workflow now includes key authoring improvements, new versioning features, and runtime enhancements. You can now host workflow definitions and instances, with side-by-side versioning, in WorkflowServiceHost. The new Dynamic Update feature allows running workflow instances to be modified. Expression extensibility gives you more flexibility in providing custom expression authoring experiences.

Releasing the source code for the .NET Framework 4.5 libraries

In addition to releasing the .NET Framework 4.5, we are pleased to announce that we are also releasing the source code for the .NET Framework libraries. We are releasing the source under the Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL). While you may enjoy reading the many interesting algorithms in our product, we release the .NET Framework source primarily to improve your debugging experience. Having access to all the managed source for the code running in your process provides you with a lot more information about what your app is actually doing.

If you are new to developing with the .NET Framework, you may not know that we have released the source and rich symbols in past versions. We know that many developers rely on our source code to efficiently get to the root cause of functional and performance problems in their apps. As a result, we provide the source code concurrently with the release of .NET Framework 4.5.

Source available on-demand, deployed to the Microsoft Reference Source Server

We’ll now look at how you can use the source code and symbols.

Debugging with .NET Framework library reference source

You may be wondering what debugging with .NET Framework reference source looks like. In the example below, you will see a tool of mine calling the public Console.WriteLine method. From there, the WriteLine method calls several private managed APIs, and eventually ends with one or more platform invoke calls. You can see each of these calls in the Call Stack window. You can look at each call frame, both in terms of the source for that frame, and any locals that are available. That’s pretty useful!

This experience also works for all .NET Framework app types, including ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Forms, console, and Windows Store apps. We call this experience of seeing .NET Framework library source in Visual Studio, “.NET Framework source stepping.” As you might guess, you can step in and out of .NET Framework code, using all of the stepping commands that you are used to, such as F11, F10, and Shift+F11. It’s pretty easy to set this up. I’ll explain how.

Enabling .NET Framework source stepping in Visual Studio 2012

We’ll first start with the instructions for enabling source and symbols download on demand. This mode works the best if you have consistent Internet access. You need to make a few configuration changes in Visual Studio 2012.

First, open the Options dialog box by choosing Options and Settings… from the Visual Studio Debug menu, expand the Debugging node, and then choose the General option. Set the following:

Clear the Enable Just My Code checkbox.

Check Enable .NET Framework source stepping.

Clear Step over properties and operators (Managed only)

Check Enable source server support.

Clear Require source files to exactly match the original version.

Next, set the following on the Symbols page which is also under the Debugging node:

You can now choose OK, and start using .NET Framework source stepping as part of your development process.

Enabling offline source in Visual Studio 2012

There are times when you don’t have a connection to the Internet, for example, when you’re traveling. Also, some people prefer to pay the download cost just once, and then not think about it again. We’ve got both of those cases covered.

You can download the source and symbols for the .NET Framework 4.5 as an MSI installer. Once you’ve installed them to a particular location on your local disk or network, you need to provide a symbol file location that’s different from what we’ve specified in the previous section. I’ve provided an example below.

Once you have the offline reference source package installed and configured (as shown above) in Visual Studio 2012, you are ready to start stepping into .NET Framework library source.

Implications for multi-targeting

You can use the .NET Framework multi-targeting features and the reference source together; however, it is important to know how these relate to each other. The reference source is tied to the runtime version that you run your project on, not the version of the .NET Framework that you are targeting. For example, even if your project targets the .NET Framework 4, you will be using the .NET Framework 4.5 reference source when debugging in Visual Studio 2012.

Closing

We hope that you are as excited as we are about the release of the .NET Framework 4.5 and the reference source. We’ve built many new features that will make you more productive targeting all of the Microsoft platforms. You can download the .NET Framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 from the Visual Studio downloads page.

As always, we would like to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to post a comment on the blog or at one of the forums that we monitor: Connect (report bugs), UserVoice (request features), and MSDN Forums (ask for help).

.NET is now a core part of several Microsoft platforms, and each has focused on specific subset of APIs. A lot of thought has been put into crafting each API surface area. Many of you have asked how the .NET APIs available for Metro style apps were chosen. In the following post, Immo Landwerth – a program manager on the CLR’s Core Framework team – provides an answer to this question. — Brandon

Since the releases of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Windows Developer Preview, developers have been busy exploring Windows 8, and many have asked questions about the subset of.NET Framework APIs that can be used to develop Windows Metro style apps. The natural tendency has been to compare the .NET APIs for Metro style apps to those available for other platforms such as Windows Phone. In particular, developers are wondering how much of their existing C# or Visual Basic source code they can expect to reasonably port to build a new Metro style app. We asked ourselves the same question when we carefully designed .NET APIs for Metro style apps.

In this post, I’d like to give you an overview of the APIs that are available to you for building Metro style apps. I will primarily discuss the design principles and requirements we used to decide which .NET Framework APIs to make available for Metro style app development. I will also touch on the relationships between .NET APIs for Metro style apps and other .NET API profiles.

Design goals

From the start of this project, we realized that we had a great opportunity to simplify app development, but also some interesting challenges to resolve. Metro style apps enable developers to provide compelling end-user experiences across all the supported Windows 8 devices. In order to achieve this goal, many important changes were made within Windows, some of which affected our design approach to the .NET Framework APIs that we would expose.

The biggest change, in terms of .NET Framework APIs, was the introduction of the Windows Runtime APIs. The Windows Runtime is a new API surface in Windows that exposes the functionality necessary to write Metro style apps. These APIs were designed to be used from a variety of programming languages: C# and Visual Basic and also native C++ and JavaScript. The task for our design team was to ensure that .NET Framework developers would be able to use both .NET Framework and Windows Runtime APIs together in a way that felt natural and intuitive. Also, the Windows Runtime team worked closely with us and approached the same task from the opposite direction.

We established the following goals to define the API surface of .NET for Metro style apps:

Avoid duplication of functionality between the Windows Runtime and the .NET Framework.

Provide a clear focus on .NET Framework APIs that are needed to write Metro style apps.

Make sure that existing .NET Framework developers will feel at home with this profile.

Make it easy to port existing C# and Visual Basic code to the profile.

We also looked at a collection of Windows Phone and Silverlight apps to determine how developers used .NET Framework APIs in practice. These apps helped us assess the two last goals, in particular.

Designing the API profile

To design a new profile for Metro style apps, it made sense to start from an existing subset of APIs, and to pare it down while extending it toward the goal, which was to provide simple and well-designed .NET Framework APIs that specifically target Metro style app development. Note that the following diagram is intended for illustrative purposes only, and is not drawn to scale.

Figure 1: .NET Framework profiles in context

In this diagram, the smaller circles represent .NET profiles. The intersection of the profiles represents APIs that are common to all the profiles. Conceptually, you can think of .NET for Metro style apps as a subset of the .NET Framework that shares a relationship with other .NET Framework profiles. Portable Class Library does not show up in this diagram as a separate profile, but is a separate concept that deserves a post of its own.

With that diagram in mind, we decided to start with the .NET API subset for the Windows Phone, with selective additions from the full .NET Framework and Silverlight. While Windows Phone apps were likely to be similar to Metro style apps, the introduction of the Windows Runtime in Windows 8 meant that the Windows Phone profile was only a starting point.

API selection process

In addition to the goals discussed earlier, we established a rigorous selection process. We made sure that every API we considered adding passed the criteria defined below:

Is the API applicable to Metro style apps? Of course, the answer isn’t always obvious. For example, ASP.NET APIs are clearly not relevant to Metro style app development, but console APIs could be considered helpful (for example, during testing). When in doubt, we asked ourselves whether we’d want to ship a Metro style app that called the given API, and we removed APIs that simply won’t work in Metro style apps. For example, file access using paths isn’t supported in Metro style apps, because file access is done through a broker process and requires using Windows Runtime APIs, so we removed those APIs.

Is the API obsolete or outdated? This includes APIs that are difficult to use correctly, are confusing, or don’t follow basic design guidelines.

Is the API duplicated by another .NET Framework API in the profile or by a Windows Runtime API? Duplication of APIs means that you have to choose, and this choice is often arbitrary. Duplication also means that you cannot easily share code with other developers, because they might have chosen to use different types in their signatures.

Arriving at the final set of APIs

After our design phase and a progressive series of refinements, we arrived at a set of APIs that met the stated design goals. We validated this set of APIs with the apps that we had available, and requested feedback from Microsoft developers who were involved in early Metro style app development. We made more changes to enable the set of scenarios that the validation exercise uncovered. With the exception of a few more minor changes, this is the surface area we made available for Metro style app development with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, and more recently, with Visual Studio 11 Beta.

The diagram below shows the functionality exposed in the .NET for Metro style apps profile. The diagram should match what you see available in Visual Studio 11 Beta. The Windows Dev Centeris a great place to explore these new APIs.

Figure 2: Feature areas supported by .NET for Metro style apps

For a more quantitative view, the following table compares the new profile to existing profiles you might be familiar with. It’s not surprising that .NET for Metro style apps is much smaller than the full .NET Framework, and similar in size to the profile for Windows Phone. .NET for Metro style apps is even smaller than the Windows Phone profile, because we removed functionality such as the UI stack and sensors, which is exposed by the Windows Runtime.

Have you used the .NET for Metro style apps and the Windows Runtime APIs to build Metro style apps? Which APIs do you think are missing? Are there any additional APIs that should have been removed? Please tell us what you think.

And since there was a great confusion in the developers’ circles about the Windows Store apps (whether XAML or HTML5), as well represented by last year’s A too early assesment of the emerging ‘Windows 8’ dev & UX functionality [June 24 – Aug 19, 2011] post of mine on this same blog, here is a detailed and quite recent clarification of those issues from the same person who was dealing with that problem from Microsoft back then as well:

Windows 8 Metro style XAML apps represent the newest member of the .NET/XAML family that includes WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and more. In this episode, we join Pete Brown, XAML guy at Microsoft, for a brief introduction to Metro style apps with a particular focus on what may be new or different for people coming from Silverlight and WPF.

More information:
– .NET for Windows Store apps overview [MSDN library, Sept 4, 2012 ]:
The .NET APIs for Windows Store apps provide a set of managed types that you can use to create Windows Store apps for Windows using C# or Visual Basic.
– C#, VB, and C++ programming concepts for Windows Store apps [MSDN library, Sept 4, 2012 ]:
Learn about programming concepts that are generally applicable to any app that you write, if you are using C#, Visual Basic or C++ as your programming language and XAML for your UI definition.

Visual Studio 2012 Launch
for Connected devices & Continuous services

Developers are now targeting a variety of platforms across the desktop, phone, and cloud while also focusing on satisfying users’ demand for great app experiences. With Visual Studio 2012 developers can create compelling experiences across multiple connected devices powered by continuous services. Join Jason Zander as he shows how all developers and organizations can take advantage of the latest platforms and technologies to turn your innovative ideas into software. Watch Keynote

Soma Somasegar: … our team has done is work hard over the last couple weeks to put together over 60 different short video clips that explain to you the different parts of Visual Studio 2012, what is coming in new, and more importantly, how you can get started and leverage that functionality. So, those videos are available today, and hopefully they prove to be a good reference point as you get on the journey with Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5.

… Jason Zander: …

… connected devices, continuous services. And what does that mean to me? Well, if I look at this overall stack, there’s all of the elements that are required. I can start off with the bottom of the stack and say, ook, at some point I’m going to have business logic. I’m going to have transaction processing. I’m going to have these systems that I need to keep up.

I’ve got some of this stuff, again, running on-premises, I might have some of it running up in the cloud. I might actually want to have the flexibility of being able to take advantage of both of those. In some cases, I’ve got systems that I’ve been maintaining and building and improving for a very long time.

Now, given I’m going to have that, I can build the software, but that’s kind of necessary but not sufficient. Until it gets into a user’s hands, I haven’t really solved the problem. So, I have to be able to manage the software. I’ve got to be able to deploy it, operate it, make sure that it’s working. So, I want some kind of system to help me out with that.

…

Now, for the services side, let me start off with the back. I think like an architect, so I’ve got to go build something that I’m going to be able to access and make sure it’s going to handle all the scenarios we care about.

Several things we want to make sure there. One, we saw with our ATM example, I may have systems that I’ve been working on at my company for a long time. This is mission-critical, bedrock stuff. We are going to produce new tools that help you bring those things forward, architecture tools, for example, new technology to build those up and add functionality.

Now, I may also want to start to expose that technology. Maybe, for example, you’re being asked to have a mobile application that can connect up to that system that you’ve been building for 20 years. So, we also are working on things like I can actually put a point of presence in the cloud, I can put it up on Azure and I can securely connect back to my on-premises. So, for example, if I were doing a reservations system which is onpremises, I can actually put a Web service-based front end in the cloud. Now I can actually have something that I can connect with mobile devices. That’s a great solution because I can use what I’ve got, but I can also start bringing it forward as well as starting to build new workloads that are distributed and can take advantage of the scale we can get with the cloud and the new programming models.

I also talked about Web applications, and that’s an example where we really want to make sure that, again, you can reach all devices, because they all have a browser in common.

So, some concrete things, and this is just a short list because we have a ton of stuff that’s new in .NET 4.5. But in this context, I’m pulling out three. In particular, a new version of ASP.NET with MVC 4, giving me some great controllers, new view functionality to write really compelling Web applications. That’s going to make it so that I can actually write apps using standards base, I can project them to any browser that’s supporting all the modern standards, I can actually be able to change form factors. I want you to be able to do that and target whichever devices people are asking you to deliver.

After that, we’ve also produced the Web API and API Controller. So, another example, if I want to export REST and standards-based interfaces to my business logic which then, again, can be used for multiple types of devices, we’re going to make that super simple for you so you don’t have to do all the plumbing. The tools actually do that for you.

New version of the Entity Framework which allows me to get access to my data. Pull it out, cache it, filter it, those sorts of things because so many of our applications on the back end are really doing a lot to crunch data and pull that back through. So, these are just three examples that are in the new version of the framework with new updates that are trying to make this space really very simple for you.

…

As I move up to the top, I can look and see you’ve got tons of devices now. And they’re not all coming from the same vendor. And that causes a new challenge because you may be asked to go write applications, and you may not be able to actually write the same project in all places. So, we’ve got to be able to make investments there that we think are going to make sense here.

So, for example, the HTML5 investments we’re making, so I can always be able to present websites and content out to all of my customers no matter what kind of device that they’re using, but I may also want to write rich applications. Some of those will be on the Microsoft stack, some of those may be on other platforms.

So, I need a way to do that too. And so being able to easily go off and expose business logic in standards-based ways that can be consumed for multiple form factors, that’s going to help me with my architecture. Now I can put the logic in the right place, I can operate it very well, I can get great connectivity and then I’m going to have a decent story.

Now, finally, social is another big element to these modern applications. So, both from the consumer side, touch, nice displays, the kind of fluid motion, social also very interesting. Showed an example up front that had a lot more to do with my friends, but with technologies like Yammer, I’m also doing a lot of that work to collaborate with my coworkers. So, I want to be able to pull those sort of elements also into my software.

…

Now, if you look at the clients, we’re also doing a significant amount of work on the Microsoft platform. So, we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming out.

Now, let’s look at a few of these. First of all, for Windows desktop, with .NET Framework 4.5, Visual Studio 2012, we have added additional improvements both in the framework as well as the tooling to help you with your existing desktop applications that you’re creating. That includes Windows Forms, that includes WPF, so if you’re doing XAML and those sort of things, for example, we’ve got Blend and those sorts of things to help you out with that.

So, we’re going to really make that still a first-class experience for you, allow you to keep adding new things, and just like we showed some cool functionality, you’re going to be able to go in and you can go actually access those same APIs that we just showed authoring from those environments.

Now, also the new, big things we’ve got coming out, Windows 8, the [Windows] Store applications that you can go out and create. Now, there, we really want to make sure that you’re able to use all your programming skills no matter what they are. So, we’ve got XAML support if you’re used to being able to do that. Say you’re already experienced with WPF as an example, I can use C# and Visual Basic, as well as C++ to author those applications.

We also have a big bet on HTML. So, I can write an application, use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, actually really write that rich application there as well.

Now, with that, I’m going to be able to put things up. And whether you’re doing the next really cool application that’s going to go off to millions of people, next really cool game, take your pick, or I’m going to be able to write something that I’m deploying in my enterprise, kind of doing group policy, but I really want it to work on these new form factors, you’ll be able to handle all of those with the tool.

Now, we have support also for Windows Phone. We’ve already got those SDK and those sorts of things that are out. You can build those applications today. And with the new versions of Windows Phone that you’ve seen us start to talk about that are coming out soon, we‘ll have tools for that as well and that will work very similar to the way that you do today. You’ll be able to install those in Visual Studio, and I‘ll be able to write applications both for the 7X and the new version that’s coming out after that. Once again, being able to do a XAML, in this case now with C++, I’ve got full flexibility.

Now, finally, we are making big investments with Internet Explorer. So we have IE9 that we’ve released, and we’ve got the new version coming out, Internet Explorer 10, which will also be shipping with Windows 8. And you saw an example with the F12 tools, but in addition to that, we want the tools to be really super simple when it comes to editing my code, being able to understand the markup that I’m doing and those sorts of things. Everything is going to be nice and fully integrated.

…

… a couple of things that I’ll leave you with, as we go off to work on connected devices and continuous services. One, we’re going to work very hard on helping you do unified application services. You saw on the back end being able to build services, expose them, consume them in multiple types of ways, on heterogeneous platforms, basically make sure you can get that out there everywhere.

The next thing is we’re really going to work hard on the modern client experiences. You saw some really cool stuff there with the power of C++, in addition to the Kinect and extra hardware, but that’s going to work for C#, VB and JavaScript, as well, all of those are going to work for you.

After that we really want the best tools for modern platforms. I think some of us probably spend more time looking at Visual Studio than most other things in our lives. So, we want to really make sure that’s a great environment for you. It’s a productive environment. It’s easy for you to work on your code, really get to the task and get all of that content done.

Jason Zander is the corporate vice president of the Visual Studio Team in the Developer Division at Microsoft. Zander’s responsibilities include the Visual Studio family of products, which covers a range of technologies: programming languages; JavaScript runtime and tools; integrated development environment and ecosystem; Microsoft Office, SharePoint and cloud tooling integration; source control and work item tracking; and advanced architecture, developer, and testing tools.

As one of the original developers of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), Zander’s primary technical areas of contribution include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging and profiling, and integration of the system into key platforms such as operating systems and databases. Before joining the Visual Studio Team, Zander was the general manager for the .NET Framework Team. He has worked on numerous products at Microsoft, including the first several releases of the CLR and .NET Framework, Silverlight, SourceSafe, and ODBC. Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Zander worked at IBM Corp. on distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab.

Zander holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Minnesota State University. In his spare time, he enjoys playing with his three children and making furniture in his shop.

Note that his corporate biography of April 1, 2010 is almost the same as the above one except the change from General Manager position to the CVP position in the above one, so by end of May the same year. According to his LinkedIn profile he became so called product unit manager in June 2002, probably his first big leap in his engineering management career.

End of the update

Today we begin accepting requests for access to the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview program. The objective is to let developers of our most-downloaded apps start optimizing them for Windows Phone 8, and we expect the majority of published developers in this situation to qualify for access.

To apply, please visit the Microsoft Connect site and complete a short application. Be sure to have your Developer ID and Application’s Product ID on hand, as well as the name of your local Phone Champ (if you don’t know your local Phone Champ, you can always get in touch via the Find My Champ app). We’ll be taking applications until Monday, September 17 at 5pm PDT. If you’re accepted to the program, you’ll hear from us in the following week with instructions on how to download the SDK and get support for questions and issues.

I know that many of you want to know why we simply don’t publically release the full SDK now. The reason is that not all Windows Phone 8 features have been announced and our SDK includes comprehensive emulators that allow developers to test apps against a wide range of Windows Phone features. We recognize that this is a different approach to delivering tools than we’ve taken in the past. Our goal is to generate as much Windows Phone 8 excitement as possible to attract new customers when phones go on sale. This is one of many steps we’re taking to help give you what you (and we) want most.

Windows Phone 8 remains on track to hit store shelves later this year and we very much want developers to create new apps for the platform, so please bear with us. There will be more SDK news in the coming weeks.

Today you may have also seen the online launch event for Visual Studio 2012. The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is built on top of Visual Studio 2012, and will give you the ability to build applications and games that target both Windows Phone 8 as well as Windows Phone 7.5. Windows Phone SDK 7.1 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2012 and runs on Windows 8.

This morning we kicked off the VS 2012 launch with an event in Seattle. You can tune in to the online coverage at http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com/ for live interviews and session recordings. In this blog post, I’ll share some of the info I presented at today’s event.

Modern Applications

It’s a really cool time to be a consumer today. New smart phones, tablets, ultrabooks, and lots of cool gadgets are coming out all the time. In this world, users have become accustomed to having a lot of choice in their applications and they expect to see certain features from the start (connected, touch, etc). We are also increasingly seeing more demand for these same types of features in the Enterprise. With products like Yammer, social has crossed over from networking with friends to my teammates. Finally, users are becoming accustomed to getting new features faster than ever before. If we want to be successful in this new world we will have to change up the way we are creating software.

The question for developers is how do we build such applications and do it with the fastest time to market? We will need a system that allows us to build out business and transactional logic at scale, exposing things in a way that we can handle many heterogeneous device types, with team software to speed up delivery. Today’s keynote walks you through how Visual Studio helps you solve these problems.

Visual Studio 2012

These trends are exciting, and provide compelling ways for users to interact with your apps. But they also present new challenges when it comes to the development of your apps. These are the kinds of things we had in mind when designing Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5.

We wanted to make sure that you could start with your existing software assets, and bring them forward to take advantage of the latest platforms. Using Visual Studio 2012, you’ll find that you can target a variety of Microsoft and non-Microsoft clients. You can also create backend services using SharePoint, SQL Server, Windows Azure, and Windows Server. And finally, you can manage your app in production using System Center integration.

Continuous Services

When designing the backend services for your app, you need them to scale to the demand, to be accessible from different clients, and to be able to leverage both cloud and on-premise components. VS 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 contain the tools and technologies to help you be successful here. (Many of these are actually “favorite features” that I’ve blogged about before. 😉 ) ASP.NET Web API and Entity Framework Code First are two useful .NET features for building your services. With EF Code First, you can start by defining classes that represent the data model, and let EF create the database tables for you. Then you can create a Web API controller to expose the data as an HTTP-based service, which can be consumed using REST, JSON, or XML. This makes it really easy to access the service from a variety of clients, so you can build a set of companion apps for phones, tablets and browsers, across any platform.

New ASP.NET Web API project

Web Experiences

One place you’ll want to consume these services is from a website – this is where you’ll get to take advantage of the latest web tooling features in VS 2012. You’ll find enhancements like JavaScript IntelliSense and debugging, HTML 5 schema validation, DOM Explorer, and new code snippets. Also check out the new Page Inspector, which allows you to analyze running web pages and find the code that generated each HTML element:

Finally, when you’re all done, you can use the Visual Studio Publish wizard to deploy the website to Windows Azure.

Connected Devices

Once you have your services set up, you’ll want to access them (by consuming the Web API) from the client apps running on your connected devices. These apps might include existing desktop apps, a new Windows Store app, a Windows Phone app, or an app for another platform. VS 2012 introduces new features to help with the development of these apps, such as the C# & VB async and await keywords, which simplify asynchronous programming, resulting in more responsive apps. You’ll also find a new and enhanced XAML editor within Visual Studio, as well as design tools for Windows Store apps in Blend for Visual Studio 2012. In case you decide to create Windows Store versions of your existing desktop apps, VS 2012 includes portable libraries which allow you to refactor your application logic so that it can be consumed from both the WPF and Windows Store app (as well as Windows Phone, and a variety of other clients you might have plans for down the road…). We’ve also added great C++ graphics tools in this release for both editing, using the Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader and Output Merger, as well as debugging, using the pixel history and other diagnostic tools:

Modern apps embrace the new needs in software development, by evolving business and consumer apps into a new era where connected, user-centric experiences are exposed through any device and powered by continuous services. Learn how Visual Studio 2012 and the Microsoft platform enable these experiences for your existing apps and empower you to build new exciting apps that delight your users.

Taking your business forward with Modern apps [19:09] with Matt Nunn

Join us to learn about the changing state of IT and application development and learn about the “New Normal” for our industry. Get a broad-picture of modern application development and how trends like the “Consumerization of IT” and “Bring your own Device” are affecting what we design and build every day. See how the juxtaposition of Modern Apps versus Mission Critical Applications and concepts like “lean Startups” inside organizations fundamentally change the way we need to think about building, deploying and managing applications whether they are to consumer, business to business or internal. But most importantly, come and see the opportunities that the “New Normal” brings for your customers, your business and you. Watch

Windows Embedded Standard v.Next will undergo a community technology preview for developers during the first quarter of 2012, with general availability three quarters after Windows 8. It will support the ARM architectureand all of the management and security functionality provided by Windows 8.

Learn the latest capabilities of .NET Framework 4.5, including enhancements in languages, libraries, and tools for creating modern apps.

This session provides an overview of new productivity features and capabilities of Visual Studio IDE that make it a very exciting release for developers. It also shows some of the C++ specific IDE features that makes writing C++ code in Visual Studio a very modern and productive experience. Watch

What’s new in C# and Visual Basic: Async made simple with Alex Turner

Explore the deep language innovation that Visual Studio 2012 brings to C# and Visual Basic. See how the Async language feature works together with new .NET Framework APIs to simplify asynchronous programming. No more callbacks!Watch

My favorite .NET 4.5 performance features with Dan Taylor

.NET just got faster. This session covers a few of the key performance features introduced in .NET 4.5, including background GC for server, Multi-core JIT, and the Managed Profile Guided Optimization Tool (Mpgo.exe). Watch

Learn how to create an app with versions for Windows Store and Windows Phone by using the new Portable Class Libraries supported in Visual Studio 2012 to share code between different versions of the app. See how the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MVVM) is ideally suited to sharing code between platforms. Watch

What is new in WF4.5? with Leon Welicki

Modern app development requires rich foundation technologies, like Workflow, in order to implement high-quality applications. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides many improvements based on key customer requests such as C# expressions, contract-first, designer improvements, side-by-side versioning of services, and State Machine. Watch this session to learn what is coming out in WF 4.5 and see some of these features in action. Watch

A look at WPF 4.5 [06:41] with Pete Brown

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4.5 powers the most complex desktop applications and is now adding a number of updates designed to help make your applications easier to develop and faster to execute. Smooth filtering and sorting of large lists of data, support for bound collection updates from background threads, full Async and await support, the Task Parallel Library (TPL), and binding update throttling are just a few of the new features. Watch

Many new Windows Store apps require connections to back-end services to show live and collaborative data coming from concurrent users and multiple services. One important element is the ability to get connections to any kind of service, using any protocol. In this case, WCF helps you connect Windows Store apps to online WebSockets services. In this session, you will see how a Windows Store app (as a WCF client) can talk to a WCF service hosted in an Azure VM role (Windows Server 2012 RC) over WebSockets. Watch

Entity Framework 5 with Rowan Miller

Modern app development requires a rich foundation as well as back-end services in which data access is critical. Entity Framework is the strategic data technology for Microsoft that helps to develop data-driven applications and domain-driven applications. Take a tour of the new features in Entity Framework 5 that are included in Visual Studio 2012. Learn to build an app that uses Code First, spatial data types, Code First Migrations, and Web API to display local parks on a webpage using Bing Maps. Watch

C++11 in Visual Studio 2012 with Stephan T. Lavavej

Microsoft is fully committed to language standards and modern app development also means being aligned with standards. Take a look at some of the Core Language and Standard Library features from the new C++11 Standard that have been implemented in Visual Studio 2012, including the range-based for-loop and the multithreading library. Watch

Making your code run faster using Visual C++ 2013 with Jim Hogg

Performance is critical in graphically intense modern apps and new user interfaces. Learn how Visual C++ 2012 makes your code run faster by using all of the hardware available in your PC (vector registers, multiple cores and graphics card) while creating a productive development environment thanks to Visual Studio 2012. Watch

Building Business Applications with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 with Joe Binder

LightSwitch for Visual Studio 2012 is the easiest way to build business applications for the desktop and the cloud. We’ll take a look at some of the biggest enhancements in LightSwitch, from producing and consuming OData feeds to creating touch-first HTML clients quickly, in this short video. Watch

Building your first app for Office with Microsoft “Napa” and Visual Studio 2012 with Saurabh Bhatia

Modern app development is tightly related to end-users’ work in which Office is “a must.” Office 2013 introduces a new app model that brings the best of web development to Office. Join us in this session to see how easy it is to start building apps for Office using these new development tools. Watch

SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2012 with Xiaoying Guo

Modern app development is tightly related with end-users’ work and collaborative applications in which SharePoint collaborative applications are key. In this session, you will see how the new SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 developer tools in Visual Studio 2012 help build SharePoint solutions more easily and efficiently. Productivity and integration with SharePoint 2012 are main targets in Visual Studio 2012. Watch

SQL Server 2012 for developers with Sarah McDevitt

Modern app development requires a rich foundation as well as back-end services in which data sources and databases are critical. Visual Studio 2012 includes major improvements for database development for both on-premise SQL Server and Azure. See how these database development tools (like SQL Data Tools) fit with your application lifecycle and deployment methods and see how you can use these tools to develop efficiently for the cloud. Watch

F# 3.0 information rich programming with Donna Malayeri

F# 3.0 is part of Visual Studio 2012 and extends the succinct and expressive F# language to support information-rich programming. This technology, which is user extensible, allows you to program directly against rich spaces of data and services, such as databases, web services, web data feeds, and data brokers. In this session, we will demonstrate the code-focused experience of F# 3.0. We will also show how to integrate an F# library into a larger, mixed-language web project. Watch

Visual Studio 2012 support for Windows Embedded Compact with Andrew Pardoe, David Campbell

Visual Studio 2012 will once again be supporting Windows Embedded Compact’s device makers and developers by providing a seamless developer experience across Microsoft’s platforms. Windows Embedded Compact developers will be able to use great new features as part of Visual Studio, including C++11 as part of the full line of Windows Embedded devices. Additionally, the .NET Compact Framework has been updated with new libraries and better performance. Come learn more in this session. Watch

Take advantage of Visual Studio 2012 to create compelling online experiences and continuous services that run on-premise and in the cloud.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2012 for web developers with Mads Kristensen

Take a journey through the features of the most significant Visual Studio release for web developers yet. Explore the HTML 5, CSS 3, and JavaScript editors, highlighting both the big and the small features that increase both productivity and developer happiness. Watch

What’s new in ASP.NET Web Forms 4.5 with Damian Edwards

ASP.NET Web Forms lets you build dynamic websites using a familiar drag-and-drop, event-driven model. See how new data-binding features make data-centric applications easier to write than ever while also generating cleaner client-side code with Unobtrusive Validation. Watch

ASP.NET and the Mobile Web [06:28] with Scott Hanselman

Mobile traffic on the web is exploding. Are you ready? ASP.NET MVC 4 includes new mobile-friendly templates, a focus on responsive design, as well as dedicated mobile templates that leverage jQuery and jQuery mobile. Watch

Getting started with ASP.NET Web API in ASP.NET MVC 4 with Daniel Roth

The last few years have seen the rise of Web APIs – services exposed over plain HTTP rather than through a more formal service contract (like SOAP or WS*). ASP.NET Web API is the new framework that ships with ASP.NET MVC 4 for building HTTP services that can reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. It’s also a great platform for building RESTful services. Watch

HTML 5 makes it easier than ever to write more expressive, compact markup. With ASP.NET 4.5 Web optimization, you can further improve the overall performance of your HTML site by taking advantage of resource bundling (combining) and minification. In this session, we’ll demonstrate Web optimization in both Web Forms and MVC projects. Watch

Debugging websites between a client and a server is difficult. Page Inspector is a new tool that brings browser diagnostics tools into Visual Studio and provides an integrated experience across the browser, ASP.NET, and source code. Using Page Inspector, you can see which elements in the source files have produced the HTML markup that is rendered to the browser. Modify CSS properties and DOM element attributes with changes reflected immediately in the browser. Watch

Looking for the best way to evolve your app to take advantage of the cloud? Visual Studio 2012 and the Windows Azure SDK for .NET provide the solution that you need to create Cloud Services while streamlining the process with modern application lifecycle tools. In this session, you will get an overview of the tools you can use to quickly build and deploy cloud services to Windows Azure. Watch

Publishing ASP.NET applications and databases to the Cloud with Visual Studio 2012 with Sayed Hashimi

Taking your ASP.NET app to the cloud has gotten even easier. While, Visual Studio 2010 included the introduction of the web publish dialog, in Visual Studio 2012 this capability has been significantly enhanced, making web publishing better than it has ever been. Learn about the latest updates for streamlining web and database publishing. Watch

Developing XAML apps for the Windows Store [09:02] with Tim Heuer

Take a quick tour of how simple and familiar it is to use the XAML UI framework and Visual Studio to build apps for the Windows Store. See the development experience of being able to visually design your app quickly. Learn how to leverage new Windows 8 features using new Visual Studio templates to help you get your app integrated into the new Windows experience with ease. Watch

The new Windows Store apps built using the XAML UI form a key pillar in the context of modern app development. You can now leverage your XAML skills (based on experience with WPF & Silverlight) to create new Windows 8 Store client apps! Watch

Using Visual Studio 2012 to build a Windows Store app using HTML and JavaScript [12:20] with Jordan Matthiesen

Customers want rich, new experiences for work, play, and entertainment. Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 have the answer. Take a tour through the tools you can use in Visual Studio to design, develop, and debug Windows Store Apps. Learn how you can use your existing HTML skills to target millions of customers through the Windows App Store. Watch

The new Windows Store apps that are built using HTML5/CSS3 UI form a key pillar in the context of modern app development. You can now leverage your HTML and web apps knowledge in order to create Windows 8 Store client applications. Come learn the most productive way to create HTML5 and CSS3 user interfaces for Windows Store Apps in Windows 8 using the new HTML5 and CSS features in Blend for Visual Studio 2012. Watch

Dev tips for building the best Windows Store app with JavaScript using Visual Studio [07:45] with Jeff Fisher

This session takes you through the new tools available in Visual Studio 2012 for building Windows Store Apps with JavaScript and HTML. Whether you are an experienced web developer or new to JavaScript, you will learn how Visual Studio can help you debug your app and solve layout problems. Watch

The new Windows Store apps that are built using C++ form a key pillar in the context of modern app development. This is especially important when you want to create the best quality and highest-performing apps capable of running on tablet hardware which require a long battery life and great performance on slower processors. So come see how XAML support for C++ in Visual Studio 2012 allows you to create fast and fluid Windows Store apps while taking advantage of the power and performance characteristics of C++. Watch

Creating Windows Store apps using C++ and DirectX with Jennifer Leaf

It is increasingly more common to see user interfaces for modern apps that are graphically intensive. Whether you are creating an interactive UI for a Windows Store app or a 3D game, having the right tools will make your job easier. Take a tour of the tools and technologies in Visual Studio 2012 for applications and games that depend on DirectX. Learn how to create DirectX apps, including using writing shaders, working with graphics assets, and debugging your app. Watch

The best apps need cloud services. Join this session to see how you can leverage Visual Studio 2012 and Windows Azure Mobile Services to add structured storage, integrated authentication, and even push notifications in literally minutes to your Windows 8 Store app. Watch

Mobile Services is the perfect partner for modern mobile apps because it reduces the friction associated with repeated common tasks as well as accelerates development and deployment. We’ll provide the backend you need so that you can deliver the experience your customers want. The ease and speed of developing with Mobile Services makes it ideal for when you want to get the next great idea to market as soon as possible.

Today, Mobile Services are available for Windows 8 apps, but subsequent preview releases will extend support to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

To start using Mobile Services, you will need to sign up for the Windows Azure free trial, if you have not done so already. If you already have a Windows Azure account, you will need to request to enroll in this preview feature. During preview, Mobile Services are free for your first ten Windows 8 applications running on shared instances.

Creating a Mobile Service is Easy

After you have either activated your Windows Azure free trial or enrolled in the Mobile Services preview, click the +NEW button at the bottom of the navigation pane.

Select ‘Mobile Service’ and then ‘Create.’

You will then be asked to either create a new SQL database or select an existing one. During the initial preview period, Mobile Services projects can only be deployed to the US-East datacenter. For this reason, international developers should expect additional latency.

In order to manage cost and latency, make sure that new SQL databases deploy to US-East and that existing ones are moved to that datacenter. Instructions on how to move a SQL database to a new datacenter can be found here and here.

To develop Windows 8 apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services, you will need to download Visual Studio 2012 Express and the Mobile Services Managed SDK. Then, it’s as simple as following the Quick Start guide.

Additional Resources

There are several resources available if you would like to learn more before you get started building your own Windows 8 apps. Scott Guthrie’s blog post shows how easy it is to get a ‘To Do’ app up and running using Mobile Services. Also, check out this video where Scott provides an introduction of Mobile Services. The developer center contains resources to teach you how to:

Validate and authorize access to data using easy scripts that execute securely, on the server

Easily authenticate your users via Windows Live

Send toast notifications and update live tiles in just a few lines of code

…

Features

The preview makes it fast and easy to create cloud services for Windows 8 applications within minutes. Here are the key benefits:

Rapid development: configure a straightforward and secure backend in less than five minutes.

Create modern mobile apps: common Windows Azure plus Windows 8 scenarios that Windows Azure Mobile Services preview will support include:
– Automated Service API generation providing CRUD functionality and dynamic schematization on top of Structured Storage
– Structured Storage with powerful query support so a Windows 8 app can seamlessly connect to a Windows Azure SQL database
– Integrated Authentication so developers can configure user authentication via Windows Live
– Push Notifications to bring your Windows 8 apps to life with up to date and relevant information

Access structured data: connect to a Windows Azure SQL database for simple data management and dynamically created tables. Easy to set and manage permissions.

Pricing

One of the key things that we’ve consistently heard from developers about using Windows Azure with mobile applications is the need for a low cost and simple offer. The simplest way to describe the pricing for Windows Azure Mobile Services at preview is that it is the same as Windows Azure Websites during preview.

Windows Azure has been reborn. Along with its original technologies, this cloud platform now provides IaaS (with Windows and Linux), web hosting, support for VPNs, and more. It’s by far the biggest change in Azure since its original 2008 announcement.

I’ve written a Microsoft-sponsored introduction to this new incarnation. It’s on WindowsAzure.com, but if you’d like a direct link, the paper is available here.

… Back in 2008, the very first pre-release version of Windows Azure supported only .NET development. Today, however, you can create Windows Azure applications in pretty much any language. Microsoft currently provides language-specific SDKs for .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python. There’s also a general Windows Azure SDK that provides basic support for any language, such as C++.

These SDKs help you build, deploy, and manage Windows Azure applications. They’re available either from http://www.windowsazure.com or GitHub, and they can be used with Visual Studio and Eclipse. Windows Azure also offers command line tools that developers can use with any editor or development environment, including tools for deploying applications to Windows Azure from Linux and Macintosh systems.

Along with helping you build Windows Azure applications, these SDKs also provide client libraries that help you create software running outside the cloud that uses Windows Azure services. For example, you might build an application running at a hoster that relies on Windows Azure blobs, or create a tool that deploys Windows Azure applications through the Windows Azure management interface. …

… Open Data Protocol, commonly called just OData … defines an abstract data model and a protocol that let any client access information exposed by any data source. Figure 1 shows some of the most important examples of clients and data sources, illustrating where OData fits in the picture.

As the figure illustrates, OData allows mixing and matching clients and data sources. Some of the most important examples of data sources that support OData today are:

Custom applications: Rather than creating its own mechanism to expose data, an application can instead use OData. Facebook, Netflix, and eBay all expose some of their information via OData today, as do a number of custom enterprise applications. To make this easier to do, OData libraries are available that let .NET Framework and Java applications act as data sources.

Cloud storage: OData is the built-in data access protocol for tables in Microsoft’s Windows Azure, and it’s supported for access to relational data in SQL Azure as well. Using available OData libraries, it’s also possible to expose data from other cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services.

Content management software: For example, SharePoint 2010 and Webnodes both have built-in support for exposing information through OData.

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket: This cloud-based service for discovering, purchasing, and accessing commercially available datasets lets applications access those datasets through OData.

While it’s possible to access an OData data source from an ordinary browser—the protocol is based on HTTP—client applications usually rely on a client library. As Figure 1 shows, the options supported today include:

Web browsers: JavaScript code running inside any popular Web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, can access an OData data source. An OData client library is available for Silverlight applications as well, and other rich Internet applications can also act as OData clients.

Mobile phones. OData client libraries are available today for Android, iOS (the operating system used by iPhones and iPads), and Windows Phone 7.

Business intelligence tools: Microsoft Excel provides a data analysis tool called PowerPivot that has built-in support for OData. Other desktop BI tools also support OData today, such as Tableau Software’s Tableau Desktop.

Custom applications: Business logic running on servers can act as an OData client. Support is available today for code created using the .NET Framework, Java, PHP, and other technologies.

The fundamental idea is that any OData client can access any OData data source. Rather than creating unique ways to expose and access data, data sources and their clients can instead rely on the single solution that OData provides.

OData was originally created by Microsoft. Yet while several of the examples in Figure 1 use Microsoft technologies, OData isn’t a Microsoft-only technology. In fact, Microsoft has included OData under its Open Specification Promise, guaranteeing the protocol’s long-term availability for others. While much of today’s OData support is provided by Microsoft, it’s more accurate to view OData as a general purpose data access technology that can be used with many languages and many platforms.

Some people like to read, others like to watch. If you’re interested in reading about how the move to SaaS changes an ISV’s business, the paper I wrote on the topic is available here. If you’d rather watch, though, there’s also a video series. The programs are:

You can watch them in any order, but the order listed above is likely to make the most sense.

Both these videos and the paper they’re based on were sponsored by Microsoft. They’re entirely generic, however, and so there’s no Microsoft-specific content. Instead, they’re intended to be helpful to any existing ISV who’s thinking about creating a SaaS offering.

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications. It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications.

Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas. We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon.

Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step.

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Storing Data in the Cloud

Storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure Mobile Services is incredibly easy. When you create a Windows Azure Mobile Service, we automatically associate it with a SQL Database inside Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Mobile Service backend then provides built-in support for enabling remote apps to securely store and retrieve data from it (using secure REST end-points utilizing a JSON-based ODATA format) – without you having to write or deploy any custom server code. Built-in management support is provided within the Windows Azure portal for creating new tables, browsing data, setting indexes, and controlling access permissions.

This makes it incredibly easy to connect client applications to the cloud, and enables client developers who don’t have a server-code background to be productive from the very beginning. They can instead focus on building the client app experience, and leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide the cloud backend services they require.

…

User Authentication and Push Notifications

Windows Azure Mobile Services also make it incredibly easy to integrate user authentication/authorization and push notifications within your applications. You can use these capabilities to enable authentication and fine grain access control permissions to the data you store in the cloud, as well as to trigger push notifications to users/devices when the data changes. Windows Azure Mobile Services supports the concept of “server scripts” (small chunks of server-side script that executes in response to actions) that make it really easy to enable these scenarios.

…

Manage and Monitor your Mobile Service

Just like with every other service in Windows Azure, you can monitor usage and metrics of your mobile service backend using the “Dashboard” tab within the Windows Azure Portal.

The dashboard tab provides a built-in monitoring view of the API calls, Bandwidth, and server CPU cycles of your Windows Azure Mobile Service. You can also use the “Logs” tab within the portal to review error messages. This makes it easy to monitor and track how your application is doing.

Scale Up as Your Business Grows

Windows Azure Mobile Services now allows every Windows Azure customer to create and run up to 10 Mobile Services in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where your mobile backend will be one of multiple apps running on a shared set of server resources). This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost beyond the database you connect your Windows Azure Mobile Service to (note: each Windows Azure free trial account also includes a 1GB SQL Database that you can use with any number of apps or Windows Azure Mobile Services).

…

Summary

I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services – there are a lot more features to explore.

With Windows Azure Mobile Services you’ll be able to build mobile app experiences faster than ever, and enable even better user experiences – by connecting your client apps to the cloud.

Hope this helps,

Scott

…

@Vlad/@Mark,
>>>>>> Do you plan to offer HTTP/REST API as well at some point?

We are going to publish documentation for the HTTP REST APIs shortly – which will make it easy for anyone to consume them from any platform. We’ll then provide pre-built REST helper methods for Win8/iOS/Android/others for those who want to work with language libraries as opposed to raw REST ones.

@FDanconia,
>>>>>> When you say “Windows 8 app”, do you mean a Metro app, or a Desktop app, or both?

The language libraries we are providing today work with WinRT – so you’d use them within Windows 8 Store Apps. But the underlying features can be accessed by any app using the REST APIs (including desktop ones).

…

@Michael,
>>>>>>> Just curious – why is this offering specific to SQL Azure? I would have expected out-of-the-box support for blobs (for example, json/xml documents) and/or table storage. Seems like cost-wise, it would be much cheaper/easier to scale as well.

We’ve heard from a lot of people who want richer querying capabilities and indexing over large amounts of data – which SQL is very good at. The pricing tier of SQL Azure is also pretty good.

We will also support unstructured storage in the future so if you don’t need rich querying you can use that too.

@Jeff,
>>>>>> I am confused. Scalability, user management, structured data – all of the features, with the arguable exception of push notifications, are useful for all types of applications. What about this is “mobile”?

We support all of those capabilities with other Azure features today as well (web-sites, storage, databases, cloud services, etc). You can also build your own mobile backends today using those existing features/capabilities to power your mobile clients.

The reason we are introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services is because a lot of developers don’t have the time/skillset/inclination to have to build a custom mobile backend themselves. Instead they’d like to be able to leverage an existing solution to get started and then customize/extend further only as needed when their business grows. Azure Mobile Services makes it really easy for them to do this – while preserving the ability to easily extend it with other azure features in the future.

…

@azureuser,
>>>>>> Excited about the release and have a couple of questions:
>>>>> – Do you plan to expose a management API for the Mobile Services? When?
>>>>> – What other capabilities are are you thinking of adding to the product?

Yes – we plan to expose a management API (as well as command-line management support) in the future. We’ll post more details about future features as they become available.

@Michael,
>>>>>>> Does Azure Mobile Services allow you to grow into more complex scenarios? For example WCF RIA Services allow you to create a more coarse grained API over your data model. Will we be able to hook into the pipeline or is it a pure CRUD proxy generator over a database?

Mobile Services does allow you to plug-into the server pipeline and do pretty course grained permissions and filtering. I’d recommend looking at the server-scripts capability to learn more about this.

…

@Mahesh,
>>>>>> How is it different than ASP.Net Web API? When to use which?Any guidance coming out?

You can think of Windows Azure Mobile Services as providing a pre-built set of Web APIs that provide common functionality that you need to build mobile apps. The benefit of using this pre-built functionality is that you don’t need to write it yourself.

ASP.NET Web API is then what you’d use when you do want to write it yourself – or extend the built-in set of Azure Mobile Services with additional custom functionality.

The good news is that they are composeable and use the same REST/OData semantics. In fact, for the C#/XAML library we ship we use the client-side Web API library to call the Windows Azure Mobile Services REST endpoints.

…

Plans call for Windows Azure Mobile Services to soon add support for Windows Phone, Apple iOS, and Google Android devices. “It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, and send out updates to clients via push notifications.” – Scott Guthrie. Additionally as per Microsoft looks to simplify adding Azure cloud support to Windows 8 apps [ZDnet, Aug 28, 2012]:

… the new Azure Mobile Services capability is going to supersede the multiplatform mobile toolkits, a spokesperson confirmed. Here’s the official statement:

Our friends at Microsoft recently introduced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud platform that provides a scalable backend for mobile applications. It’s an easy way to add login capabilities and remote data storage to your application without building your own backend.

We are really pleased to announce that we have partnered with Microsoft to bring Mobile Services to iOS and Android developers, enabling them to easily use Microsoft’s cloud service from a common C# code base. While we have long enjoyed a productive relationship with Microsoft, we are excited to collaborating with Microsoft at a new level and to help Windows Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft reach additional platforms.

We are making a preview of our cross-platform Azure Mobile Services client framework available today on GitHub under a permissive open source software license. The framework, which is a port of Microsoft’s own Mobile Services client library, will make it easy for developers to use Microsoft’s hosted backend in their Xamarin-powered Android and iOS applications. You can start using it today in your own projects.

Azure Mobile Services offers elastic scalability, allowing you to get the capacity that you need as the popularity of your application grows. The client framework takes advantage of your favorite C# features to simplify data storage and retrieval. For example, you can access your remote data with LINQ queries instead of crafting your own REST API calls. Instead of dealing with a schema and parsing database output, you use attributes to associate remote data fields with class properties.

The following code snippet from a simple todo list application demonstrates how to retrieve database entries that match a specific condition:

With Xamarin and Azure Mobile Services, you can write your database logic once and use it across platforms. The code above will work seamlessly across iOS, Android, and Windows.

In addition to data storage and retrieval, Azure Mobile Services also supports simple account management. It allows you to authenticate your users against their Windows Live identity, sparing you the trouble of having to build and maintain your own account system.

Mobile Services for Xamarin gives you cross-platform support for the data storage and authentication features. We welcome code contributions from the community and would love to hear about the apps you’re building that leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services.

To learn more about the framework and how you can put it to use in your own applications, check out code samples. For more information about Mobile Services, you can visit the official Windows Azure blog or dev center.

Explore the features that make Xamarin great for mobile app development

Native APIs, Native UIs, No Compromises

Xamarin provides complete access to each platform’s native SDK and UI controls, projecting the entire native API of each device into C#. So the apps you create are native, not write-once/run-anywhere applications that look alien on every platform. Xamarin gives you access to all of the features that make each platform unique. The result is mobile app nirvana.

High Performance

Unlike other cross-platform frameworks, with Xamarin, your app is compiled to a native binary, not interpreted. Native compilation gives users brilliant app performance for even the most demanding scenarios like high frame rate gaming and complex data visualizations. With a small footprint (2.5 MB added to your application code), and negligible impact to app startup time, you can build apps that run faster, wherever they run.

Share code between platforms

A significant portion of the functionality and development time invested in your mobile app exists in business logic, data access and network communications. With Xamarin, you can share all of code between platforms, while still delivering a device-specific, native user interface. Xamarin lets you run the same C# code on iOS and Android, as well as Windows Phone, which comes with C# built-in.

Watch this video to see an example of the same database, network and business code shared across an iOS and Android app.

Write beautiful code with C#

Write shorter, more succinct, and more maintainable code leveraging advanced language features such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ), delegates, lambdas, events, garbage collection and many other features.

Watch this video to see a side-by-side comparison of C# against Objective-C and see the advantages of the Xamarin over Java on Android.

Point-and-click UI design

Xamarin leverages native layout formats for iOS and Android, and enables user interfaces to be built quickly with drag-and-drop simplicity. Xamarin integrates with Xcode’s Interface Builder, allowing you to create iOS UIs with the tools Apple provides. On Android, the Xamarin Designer is the world’s best tool for generating Android user interfaces, allowing you to target multiple screen sizes and orientations among other features.

Watch this video to see how you can generate amazing, native userinterfaces in no time.

Explore native APIs quickly with code completion

Code completion in C# gives you a huge productivity boost by enabling you to explore the giant landscape of native iOS and Android APIs while you type. Quickly find the type or method you are looking for, and discover new options without breaking your train of thought.

Watch this video to see how quick and easy it is to build appfunctionality with autocomplete.

Advanced debugger

Unlike almost any other mobile app framework, Xamarin gives you the full power of a modern debugger, in the simulator and on device. You can debug from MonoDevelop or from Visual Studio. Set breakpoints, watchpoints, single-step through code, hover over variable to see their values and take advantage of many other world-class debugging capabilities.

With Xamarin, you can package and distribute your apps from directly within the IDE. On iOS, we include integrated support to distribute internal appsover the air with TestFlight.

Platform Extensibility

Add virtually any functionality to your apps. Your apps can incorporate libraries written in C, Objective-C, C++ or Java. Watch this video to see how the entire native ecosystem is available to in your apps.

Stay Current

Xamarin always stays up-to-date with the latest APIs from Apple and Google so you can incorporate the latest features in your apps. We are committed to fast platform updates so that you can stay focused on what you do best — building great apps!

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Introduction to Xamarin

When considering how to build iOS and Android applications, many people think that the indigenous languages, Objective-C and Java, respectively, are the only choices. However, over the past few years, an entire new ecosystem of platforms for building mobile applications has emerged. These new solutions include Xamarin, and HTML solutions such as PhoneGap and Appcelerator, etc., just to name a couple.

Xamarin is unique in this space by offering a single language (C#), a class library, and a runtime that work across all three mobile platforms of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone (Windows Phone’s indigenous language is already C#), while still compiling native (non-interpreted) applications that are performant enough even for demanding games.

Each of these platforms has a different feature set and each varies in its ability to write native applications–that is, applications that compile down to native code and that interoperate fluently with the underlying Java subsystem. For example, some platforms only allow you to build apps in HTML and JavaScript (such as Appcelerator and PhoneGap), whereas some are very low level and only allow C/C++ code. Some platforms (such as Flash) don’t even utilize the native control toolkit.

Xamarin is unique in that it combines all of the power of the indigenous platforms and adds a number of powerful features of its own, including:

Complete Binding for the Indigenous SDKs – Xamarin contains bindings for nearly the entire underlying platform SDKs in both iOS and Android. Additionally, these bindings are strongly typed, which means that they’re easy to navigate and use, and provide robust compile-time type checking and auto completion during development. This leads to fewer runtime errors and higher quality applications.

Objective-C, Java, C, and C++ Interop – Xamarin provides facilities for directly invoking Objective-C, Java, C, and C++ libraries, giving you the power to use a wide array of 3rd party code that has already been created. This lets you take advantage of existing iOS and Android libraries written in Objective-C, Java, or C/C++. Additionally, Xamarin offers binding projects that allow you to easily bind native Objective-C and Java libraries by using a declarative syntax.

Modern Language Constructs – Xamarin applications are written in C#, a modern language that includes significant improvements over Objective-C and Java such as Dynamic Language Features, Functional Constructs such as Lambdas, LINQ, Parallel Programming features, sophisticated Generics, and more.

Amazing Base Class Library (BCL) – Xamarin applications use the .NET BCL, a massive collection of classes that have comprehensive and streamlined features such as powerful XML, Database, Serialization, IO, String, and Networking support, just to name a few. Additionally, existing C# code can be compiled for use in your applications, which provides access to thousands upon thousands of libraries that will let you do things that aren’t already covered in the BCL.

Modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE) – Xamarin uses MonoDevelop on Mac OSX, and also MonoDevelop or Visual Studio 2010 on Windows. These are both modern IDE’s that include features such as code auto completion, a sophisticated Project and Solution management system, a comprehensive project template library, integrated source control, and many other options.

Mobile Cross Platform Support – Xamarin offers sophisticated cross-platform support for the three major mobile platforms of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Applications can be written to share up to 90% of their code, and our Xamarin.Mobile library offers a unified API to access common resources across all three platforms. This can significantly reduce both development costs and time to market for mobile developers that target the three most popular mobile platforms.

Because of Xamarin’s powerful and comprehensive feature set, it fills a void for application developers that want to use a modern language and platform to develop cross-platform mobile applications.

Note:

This Getting Started series focuses on teaching you how to build iOS and Android applications. If you’re interested in building for Windows Phone, Microsoft offers tutorials here. If you’re interested in learning more about cross-platform development with Xamarin (including Windows Phone), you can find our guide here.

Let’s take a look at how this all works.

How Does Xamarin Work?

Xamarin offers two commercial products, Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, also known as MonoTouch and Mono for Android, respectively. They’re both built on top of Mono, an open-source version of the .NET Framework based on the published .NET ECMA standards. Mono has been around almost as long as the .NET framework itself, and runs on nearly every imaginable platform, including Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, and Mac OSX.

MonoTouch.dll and Mono.Android.dll

Xamarin applications are built against a subset of the .NET BCL known as the Xamarin Mobile Profile. This profile has been created specifically for mobile applications and packaged in the MonoTouch.dll and Mono.Android.dll (for iOS and Android, respectively). This is much like the way Silverlight (and Moonlight) applications are built against the Silverlight/Moonlight .NET Profile. In fact, the Xamarin Mobile profile is equivalent to the Silverlight 4.0 profilewith a bunch of BCL classes added back in.

In addition to the BCL, these .dlls include wrappers for nearly the entire iOS SDK and Android SDK. Availability of these libraries allows you to invoke the underlying SDK APIs directly from C#.

Note:

Xamarin applications are compiled against the Xamarin Mobile profile, just like Silverlight/Moonlight apps are compiled against theirs. This means that you cannot use off-the-shelf .NET assemblies without recompiling the C# source against the Xamarin Mobile profile.

Application Output

When Xamarin applications are compiled, the result is an Application Package, either an .app file in iOS, or an .apk file in Android. These files are indistinguishable from indigenous application packages and are deployable in the exact same way.

…

This guide introduces the Xamarin platform and how to architect a cross-platform application to maximize code re-use and deliver a high-quality native experience on all of the main mobile platforms: iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

The approach used in this document is generally applicable to both productivity apps and game apps, however the focus is on productivity and utility (non-game applications). See the [Introduction to MonoGame document] for cross-platform game development guidance.

The phrase “write-once, run everywhere” is often used to extol the virtues of a single codebase that runs unmodified on multiple platforms. While it has the benefit of code re-use, that approach often leads to applications that have a lowest-common-denominator feature-set and a generic-looking user interface that does not fit nicely into any of the target platforms.

Xamarin is not just a “write-once, run everywhere” platform, because one of its strengths is the ability to implement native user interfaces specifically for each platform. However, with thoughtful design it’s still possible to share most of the non-user interface code and get the best of both worlds: write your data storage and business logic code once, and present native UIs on each platform. This document discusses a general architectural approach to achieve this goal.

Here is a summary of the key points for creating Xamarin cross-platform apps:

 Use C# – Write your apps in C#. Existing code written in C# can be ported to iOS and Android using Xamarin very easily, and obviously used on Windows Phone.

 Utilize the MVC design pattern – Develop your application’s User Interface using the Model/View/Controller pattern. Architect your application using a Model/View/Controller approach or a Model/View/ViewModel approach where there is a clear separation between the “Model” and the rest. Determine which parts of your application will be using native user interface elements of each platform (iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8/RT) and use this as a guideline to split your application into two components: “Core” and “UserInterface”.

3. On Windows Phone you will be using the XAML/Silverlight presentation layer, using Visual Studio or Blend’s UI designer

4. On Windows 8, use the Metro APIs to create a native user experience.

The amount of code re-use will depend largely on how much code is kept in the shared core and how much code is user-interface specific. The core code is anything that does not interact directly with the user, but instead provides services for parts of the application that will collect and display this information.

To increase the amount of code re-use, you can adopt cross-platform components that provide common services across all these systems such as:

• SQLite-NET for local SQL storage,

• Xamarin.Mobile for accessing device-specific capabilities including the camera, contacts and geolocation,

• Using framework features for networking, web services, IO and more.

Some of these components are implemented in the Tasky Pro and MWC 2012 case studies.

SEPARATE REUSABLE CODE INTO A CORE LIBRARY

By following the principle of separation of responsibility by layering your application architecture and then moving core functionality that is platform agnostic into a reusable core library, you can maximize code sharing across platforms, as the figure below illustrates:

CASE STUDIES

There are two case studies that accompany this document – Tasky Pro and MWC 2012. Each case study discusses the implementation of the concepts outlined in this document in a real-world example. The code is open source and available on github.

Understanding the Xamarin Mobile Platform

The Xamarin platform consists of a number of elements that allow you to develop applications for iOS and Android:

 C# language – Allows you to use a familiar syntax and sophisticated features like Generics, Linq and the Parallel Task Library.

 Compiler – Depending on the platform, produces a native app (eg. iOS) or an integrated .NET application and runtime (eg. Android). The compiler also performs many optimizations for mobile deployment such as linkingaway un-used code.

 IDE tools – The MonoDevelop IDE and the Xamarin plug-in for Visual Studio allow you to create, build and deploy Xamarin projects.

In addition, because the underlying language is C# with the .NET framework, projects can be structured to share code that can also be deployed to Windows Phone.

Under the Hood

Although Xamarin allows you to write apps in C#, and share the same code across multiple platforms, the actual implementation on each system is very different.

COMPILATION

The C# source makes its way into a native app in very different ways on each platform:

 iOS – C# is ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to ARM assembly language. The .NET framework is included, with unused classes being stripped out during linking to reduce the application size. Apple does not allow runtime code generation on iOS, so some language features are not available (see MonoTouch Limitations).

 Android – C# is compiled to IL and packaged with MonoVM + JIT’ing. Unused classes in the framework are stripped out during linking. The application runs side-by-side with Java/Dalvik and interacts with the native types via JNI (see Mono for Android Limitations).

 Windows Phone – C# is compiled to IL and executed by the built-in runtime, and does not require Xamarin tools. Designing Windows Phone applications following Xamarin’s guidance makes it simpler to re-use the code on iOS and Android.

The linker documentation for MonoTouch and Mono for Android provides more information about this part of the compilation process.

PLATFORM SDK ACCESS

Xamarin makes the features provided by the platform-specific SDK easily accessible with familiar C# syntax:

 iOS – MonoTouch exposes Apple’s CocoaTouch SDK frameworks as namespaces that you can reference from C#. For example the UIKit framework that contains all the user interface controls can be included with a simple
using MonoTouch.UIKit; statement.

 Android – Mono for Android exposes Google’s Android SDK as namespaces, so you can reference any part of the supported SDK with using statement, such as using Android.Views; to access the user interface controls.

 Windows Phone – Windows Phone is not part of the Xamarin platform. When building apps for Windows Phone in C# the SDK is implicitly available to your application, including Silverlight/XAML controls for the user interface.

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION FOR DEVELOPERS

The beauty of Xamarin is that despite the differences under the hood, MonoTouch and Mono for Android (coupled with Microsoft’s Windows Phone SDK) offer a seamless experience for writing C# code that can be re-used across all three platforms.

Business logic, database usage, network access and other common functions can be written once and re-used on each platform, providing a foundation for platform-specific user interfaces that look and perform as a native application.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Availability

Xamarin development can be done in either MonoDevelop or Visual Studio. The IDE you choose will be determined by the platforms you wish to target.

Because iOS apps can only be developed on a Mac, and Windows Phone apps can only be developed on Windows, it is impossible to develop for all three platforms on the same operating system. However following the guidance in this document it is possible to reuse code across all these platforms.

The development requirements for each platform are discussed in more detail below.

IOS

Apple’s Xcode IDE must be installed to provide the compiler and simulator for testing. To test on a real device and submit applications for distribution you must join Apple’s Developer Program ($99 USD per year). Each time you submit or update an application it must be reviewed and approved by Apple before it is made available for customers to download.

Code is written with Xamarin’s MonoDevelop IDE and screen layouts can be edited with Apple’s Interface Builder. Refer to the MonoTouch Installation Guide for detailed instructions.

ANDROID

Android application development requires the Java and Android SDKs to be installed. These provide the compiler, emulator and other tools required for building, deployment and testing. Java, Google’s Android SDK and Xamarin’s tools can all be installed and run on the following configurations:

 Mac OS X with the MonoDevelop IDE

 Windows 7 or 8 with the MonoDevelop IDE

 Windows 7 or 8 with Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012

Xamarin provides a unified installer that will configure your system with the prerequisite Java, Android and Xamarin tools (including a visual designer for screen layouts). Refer to the Mono for Android Installation Guide for detailed instructions.

You can build and test applications on a real device without any license from Google, however to distribute your application through a store (such as Google Play, Amazon or Barnes & Noble) a registration fee may be payable to the operator. Google Play will publish your app instantly, while the other stores have an approval process similar to Apple’s.

WINDOWS PHONE

Windows Phone apps are built with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 toolset. They do not use Xamarin directly, however C# code can be shared with across Windows Phone, iOS and Android using Xamarin’s tools. Visit Microsoft’s App Hub to learn about the tools required for Windows Phone development.

Creating the User Interface (UI)

A key benefit of using Xamarin is that the application user interface uses native controls on each platform and is therefore indistinguishable from an application written in Objective-C or Java (for iOS and Android respectively).

When building screens in your app, you can either lay out the controls in code or create complete screens using the design tools available for each platform.

PROGRAMMATICALLY CREATE CONTROLS

Each platform allows user interface controls to be added to a screen using code. This can be very time-consuming as it can be difficult to visualize the finished design when hard-coding pixel coordinates for control positions and sizes.

Programmatically creating controls does have benefits though, particularly on iOS for building views that resize or render differently across the iPhone and iPad screen sizes.

VISUAL DESIGNER

Each platform has a different method for visually laying out screens:

 iOS – MonoDevelop integrates with Apple’s Xcode Interface Builder which allows you to create individual screen layouts or storyboards that describe multiple screens. This results in .XIB or .STORYBOARD files that are included in your project.

These screenshots show the visual screen designers available on each platform:

iOS:

Android:

Windows Phone:

In all cases the elements that you create visually can be referenced in your code.

USER INTERFACE CONSIDERATIONS

A key benefit of using Xamarin to built cross platform applications is that they can take advantage of native UI toolkits to present a familiar interface to the user. The UI will also perform as fast as any other native application.

Some UI metaphors work across multiple platforms (for example, all three platforms use a similar scrolling-list control) but in order for your application to ‘feel’ right the UI should take advantage of platform-specific user interface elements when appropriate. Examples of platform-specific UI metaphors include:

 iOS – hierarchical navigation with soft back button, tabs on the bottom of the screen.

 Android – hardware/system-software back button, action menu, tabs on the top of the screen.

It is recommended that you read the design guidelines relevant to the platforms you are targeting:

 iOS – Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines

 Android – Google’s User Interface Guidelines

 Windows Phone – User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone

Library and Code Re-use

The Xamarin platform allows re-use of existing C# code across all platforms as well as the integration of libraries written natively for each platform.

C# SOURCE AND LIBRARIES

Because Xamarin products use C# and the .NET framework, lots of existing source code (both open source and in-house projects) can be re-used in MonoTouch or Mono for Android projects. Often the source can simply be added to a Xamarin solution and it will work immediately. If an unsupported .NET framework feature has been used, some tweaks may be required.

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Our mission is to produce the best software development tools in the world, and to make it fast, easy and fun to build great mobile apps.

Xamarin was founded in May 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with an engineering office in Cambridge, MA.

Nat Friedman

CEO

An entrepreneur and developer, Nat is passionate about building products that delight customers, with love and attention to detail. Nat has two degrees from MIT and has been writing software for 27 years. In 1999, he co-founded Ximian with Miguel. Nat was a co-founder and chairman of the GNOME foundation. At Novell Nat ran engineering for a $110M product and served as CTO of the Linux business. Nat is an avid traveler who visited 20 countries in 2010, an active angel investor, and a private pilot.

Miguel de Icaza

CTO

Miguel has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001 and oversaw the launches of Mono’s desktop, server and mobile offerings at Novell. Before Mono he started writing free software in 1992 and co-founded the GNOME project in 1997. In 1999 Miguel co-founded Ximian with Nat. He also worked on the Midnight Commander file manager, Gnumeric, and the Linux kernel. He serves as an advisor at Stack Exchange. He has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

Joseph Hill

COO

Joseph has been an active participant in the Mono community since 2003, and has also been an active contributor to several open source .NET applications. As a professional developer, he has done significant work in design and implementation of .NET applications for a number of customers including Fortune 50 companies in areas such as messaging solutions, supply chain management, and others. In January 2008, Joseph joined Novell to serve as the Product Manager for Mono, ultimately driving the product development and marketing efforts to launch MonoTouch and Mono for Android.

This video walkthrough demonstrates how to connect an iOS client to a website running in Windows Azure Websites. In this scenario, the website provides the functionality to shorten URLs. The mobile client will display the shortened URLs and enable users to shorten new URLs.

This is an iOS application which demonstrates how to connect to Windows Azure Mobile Services. The client has a dependency on setting up a Mobile Service in the Windows Azure portal. The application allows users to view a list of todo items, mark them as complete, and add new ones. This sample was built using XCode and the iOS Framework.

As mentioned yesterday by me, and half the internet, Windows Azure Mobile Services has been launched. Already people have started talking about how fast and easy it is to use Mobile Services as a backend. One thing that I highlighted and that others have pointed out is that official support for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8 is coming. This means that if you want to download and install pre-built REST helper methods for your non-Windows 8 operating system, you’ll have to wait. However, since all of the calls to Mobile Services are being done over HTTP and are REST based, it’s pretty easy to see what each call sends over the wire. This means that we can take that information and write our own code that will run on iOS and Android and hit Mobile Services.

Today, I’ll start to show you how to do just that. In this article, we’ll walk through creating a new Mobile Service and then connecting an iOS client to it. We’ll only use some basic data capabilities provided by Mobile Services but in the coming weeks, I’ll show you how to watch the HTTP calls made by a Windows 8 app (so you can figure out what’s going across the wire) and then how to reproduce some of the more advanced things in both iOS and Android. By the end of this walkthrough, we’ll have reproduced in an iOS client, all of the capabilities of the initial Todos Windows 8 Mobile Services demo. You’ll be able to add new todos, list those todos, and mark todos complete. Let’s get started.

Creating a new Mobile Service

In order to create a Mobile Service, you first need to have a Windows Azure account. You can sign for a free trial here. This free trial is good for three months of access. Once you’ve done that, log into your account, and go to the Account Center. From there, access the preview features area of the site. There you’ll see a button to “try it now”.

…

The Windows 8 Client?

If you have a computer running Windows 8 as well, I would suggest following the instructions for creating “a new Windows 8 application” seen above. We’ve already created the table, but following those steps will enable you to download a Visual Studio solution that is 100% ready to run and you can see how the basic todos app runs. It’s not necessary for proceeding with the iOS client, but it means that you can already have a few todos in your database. Either way, we can proceed to the iOS client now.

Starting the iOS Client

Start up Xcode and create a new project. For this demo, we’ll just create a Single View Application. You can name your project whatever you want (I’ve named mine, “mymobileservice”). Start by going into theMainStoryboard.storyboard. You should see the default storyboard with a single view controller.

…

Conclusion

While official support for anything except Windows 8 is coming, you don’t have to wait to make use of Windows Azure Mobile Services. As seen here, the Mobile Services end points are just looking for data to come across in JSON format and only expect you to send over a single additional header (X-ZUMO-APPLICATION). Today we’ve only looked at a small piece of what you can do with data, as there is much more. I’ll tackle some of those more advanced things in the coming weeks. I’ll also go through how to inspect the HTTP traffic going across the wire from a Windows 8 app so you can see what’s going and how to call into Mobile Services. As a reminder, if you’re looking to test out Mobile Services, sign up for a free Windows Azure account here.

This video walkthrough demonstrates how to connect an Android client to a website running in Windows Azure Websites. In this scenario, the website provides the functionality to shorten URLs. The mobile client will display the shortened URLs and enable users to shorten new URLs.

This is an Android application which demonstrates how to connect to Windows Azure Mobile Services. The client has a dependency on setting up a Mobile Service in the Windows Azure portal. The application allows users to view a list of todo items, mark them as complete, and add new ones. This sample was built using Eclipse and the Android SDK.

After posting yesterday about connecting Windows Azure Mobile Services and iOS, I had to follow it up with Android! Today, I’m happy to release this walkthrough for connecting Android to Mobile Services. If you read my post from earlier this week on Mobile Services, you’d know that official support for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8 is coming. This means that if you want to download and install pre-built REST helper methods for your non-Windows 8 operating system, you’ll have to wait. However, since all of the calls to Mobile Services are being done over HTTP and are REST based, it’s pretty easy to see what each call sends over the wire. This means that we can take that information and write our own code that will run on Android and iOS and hit Mobile Services.

Today, I’ll continue showing you how to do just that. In this article, we’ll walk through creating a new Mobile Service and then connecting an Android client to it. We’ll only use some basic data capabilities provided by Mobile Services but in the coming weeks, I’ll show you how to watch the HTTP calls made by a Windows 8 app (so you can figure out what’s going across the wire) and then how to reproduce some of the more advanced things in both iOS and Android. By the end of this walkthrough, we’ll have reproduced in an Android client, all of the capabilities of the initial Todos Windows 8 Mobile Services demo. You’ll be able to add new todos, list those todos, and mark todos complete. Let’s get started.

Samsung had a number of enhanced GALAXY products (see them in the “Details for Samsung” section below). The really strong message from innovation point of view from them has, however, been (considered by them as “hidden gems”):Samsung Mobile – Beyond Product [SAMSUNGmobile YouTube Channel]

Tour the Samsung Mobile booth at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona. Find out more about our new innovations, from AllShare Play and Control through Smart Driving and Smart School to NFC mobile payments.

UPDATE: for Nokia the major competition is the overall Android ecosystem, and not only in the proper smartphone market as:
– repeatedly stressed by Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia:

Market overview

… Today, however, the distinction between these two classes of products is blurring. Increasingly, basic feature phone models, supported by innovations in both hardware and software, are also providing people with the opportunity to access the Internet and applications and, on the whole, offering them a more smartphone-like experience.

Whether smartphones or feature phones, mobile devices geared for Internet access and their accompanying Internet data plans are also becoming increasingly affordable and, consequently, they are becoming attractive to a broader range of consumer groups and geographic markets. A notable recent development has been the increased affordability of devices based on the Android platform, which has enabled some vendors to offer smartphones for below EUR 100, excluding taxes and subsidies, and thus address a portion of the market which has been dominated by more basic feature phone offerings.

….

Competition

… some competitors’ offerings based on Android are available for purchase by consumers for below EUR 100, excluding taxes and subsidies, and thus address a portion of the market which has been traditionally dominated by feature phone offerings, including those offered by Nokia. Accordingly, lower-priced smartphones are increasingly reducing the addressable market and lowering the price points for feature phone. …

Principal Factors & Trends Affecting our Results of Operations

Devices & Service

…

Increased Pervasiveness of Smartphones and Smartphone-like Experiences Across the Price Spectrum

During the past year, we saw the increasing availability of more affordable smartphones, particularly Android-based smartphones, connected devices and related services which were able to reach lower price points contributing to a decline in the average selling prices of smartphones in our industry.

This trend affects us in two ways. First, it puts pressure on the price of our smartphones and potentially our profitability, as we need to price our smartphones competitively. We currently partially address this with our Symbian device offering in specific regions and distribution channels, and we plan to introduce and bring to markets new and more affordable Nokia products with Windows Phone in 2012, such as the Nokia Lumia 610 announced in February 2012. Second, lower-priced smartphones put pressure on our higher-end feature phone offering from our Mobile Phones unit. We are addressing this with our planned introductions in 2012 ofsmarter, competitively priced feature phones with more modern user experiences, including software, services and application experiences. In support of our Mobile Phones business, we also plan to drive third party innovation through working with our partners to engage in building strong, local ecosystems.

For Nokia, accordingly, a number of innovations have already been introduced on the MWC 2012, from the hardware level up to the services which surround all that. So for Nokia I will provide a video-based overview here well before going into the “Details for Nokia” section in the very end:

The funky Nokia Lumia 610 http://nokia.ly/AztJvZ is the most affordable Lumia phone yet, but it delivers everything you need in a smartphone. The People Hub pulls family and friends’ contact details in one place, along with Facebook and Twitter feeds. A choice of colours, with metallic trim, makes the phone an individual style statement. [$254 (€189). Has a 3.7” 800 x 480 WVGA LCD display.]

The Windows Phone Xbox tie-in and 5-megapixel camera add to the funky package. And Nokia Music, with Mix Radio (availability may vary by market), Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport and Nokia Reading – make this phone unbeatable value.

Meet the new Nokia Lumia 900 with Windows Phone http://nokia.ly/zoyq6L Find out how fast amazing can be. And social. And beautiful. With its award winning design including front facing camera and Live Tiles, keeping in touch with friends, and the entire Internet, has never been so easy. [$645 (€480).Has a 4.3” 800 x 480 WVGA AMOLED ClearBlack display with Gorilla Glass.]

Nokia Reading follows the same simple and elegant panorama design we’ve become used to with other services, delivering the whole experience through a beautifully designed “reading hub.”

Nokia is working with some of the world’s biggest publishers, including Penguin and Hachette, and Pearson to launch a world class e-book and audiobook experience that’s been designed specifically for the Nokia Lumia.

Using a single, simple app you can choose your own favourite authors, or select bestselling novels and the top local books in your own language. If you’re not sure that you’ll like a book, Nokia Reading lets you browse some sample pages before you buy. Or you can download and read one of the thousands of classic works of literature that will be available for free.

Once you have chosen a book, large, clear, smartphone screens like those on the Nokia Lumia make reading an enjoyable experience – and you can switch to ‘night mode,’ change the font or adjust brightness, if your eyes get tired in the evening. It’s also great on an underground train or plane, because you can read everything offline after downloading beforehand over WiFi or mobile network

In coming months you’ll also be able to create a personalized magazine page (called “news stream”) that updates content across the most popular categories, and adds web content from your chosen sites.

The game changer! Nokia 808 PureView http://nokia.ly/xz6mhS takes every bit of image goodness captured by a 41MP sensor and Carl Zeiss lens and turns it into beautifully detailed images and Full HD videos. Be ready to shoot and share with friends in an instant. [$605 (€450). Has a 4” 640 x 360 16:9 nHD AMOLED display.]

UPDATE: Zooming in on Nokia PureView [article on the Nokia Conversations‎ blog, Feb 29, 2012]: meet the brains behind Nokia PureView Eero Salmelin and Juha Alakarhu, and also learn the history of this 5 years long journey that lead to the delivery on MWC 2012

Taking pride of place at their stand, the world’s best camera phone owes much to Dolby technologies for helping to make it an HD mobile entertainment device.

For the PureView is also about pure audio thanks to its high-definition Dolby Digital Plus 5.1-channel surround sound which plays on HD TVs, and home theatre systems, and when combined with Dolby Headphone technology – also built into the PureView – provides a personal 5.1 surround experience over any headphones.

Mobile Sales Director Shawn Richards talked us through the tech on a Nokia 700 with a demo from Batman movie The Dark Knight.

He explained that the Dolby Headphone upgrade transforms stereo content into a personal surround sound.

“You get a more natural, engaging, and authentic sound,” he said. “Good audio is even more important when you are watching a movie on a small screen. And Dolby Headphone creates a totally immersive feel.”

The new Nokia Stereo Bluetooth Headset BH-221 comes with an integrated FM radio and OLED display. It as excellent audio quality and NFC for easy pairing with your phone. Learn more at: www.accessories.nokia.com

Nokia Asha 302 http://nokia.ly/xXK4kV was designed with one simple goal in mind – to design the best looking QWERTY phone for today’s urban professionals. The metallic touch points, bold and sophisticated colors and smooth edges help users stand out and project success giving the phone a great premium feel. [$128 (€95).Has a 2.4” 320 x 240 QVGA TFT display.]

UPDATE: The Nokia C3-00 won Best Feature Phone or Entry Level Phone at the GSMA Awards 2012 in Barcelona. Blanca Juti, VP for Mobile Phones Product Marketing said to Nokia Conversations after collecting the prize: “It’s great for our products going forward, because the Nokia Asha 302 we launched yesterday is pretty much the successor to C3 which has had an amazing run in the market.” See here.

Nokia Asha 302 http://nokia.ly/x5m2zm is a QWERTY phone with great value for money. It is packed with a 1 Ghz processor and is great for social networking, Email, Instant messaging, supports Mail for Exchange and has a premium design with stunning looks.

The Nokia Asha 203 http://nokia.ly/x78ZBe is a touch phone with a traditional keypad, offering fast and affordable access to the internet, easy access to email and social networks as well as a 40 EA games gift offering. [$81 (€60).Has a 2.4” QVGA display.]

The Nokia Asha 202 http://nokia.ly/yOGbDA is a touch phone with a traditional keypad, offering fast and affordable access to the internet, easy access to email and social networks as well as a 40 EA games gift offering. Plus it comes with Easy Swap Dual SIM. [$81 (€60).Has a 2.4” QVGA display.]

After exactly a year from the announcement of their new strategic set-up and direction it is quite obvious from all that above that Nokia is well on to realizing the corresponding transition. In fact they are redefining themselves which is well described by this video just published 2 days before the start of MWC 2012:

We believe that everybody can have a richer, fuller life every day, everywhere. That means upgrading an ordinary moment to an exciting one or finding an unexpected experience to share with others. Intuitively, fast and easy. This is Nokia’s new mantra, this is the new essence of Nokia.

Game On With Samsung GALAXY S WiFi 4.2 [Samsung Mobile Press release on MWC 2012]: “Samsung introduces GALAXY S WiFi 4.2, the best of Android experiences with powerful gaming on the go. This experience is further enhanced with the device’s superior SoundAlive audio system, offering great sound either through a front stereo speaker or headphones. A gyroscope sensor enables the user to control the device by moving it, providing truly engaging and intuitive gaming.”

UPDATE: Chinese closing gap in hardware [Korea JoongAng Daily, Feb 29, 2012]: “Samsung decided not to reveal its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone at this year’s MWC due to fears it could give Chinese handset makers an advantage, insiders say. Samsung showcased its Galaxy S II smartphone at last year’s event, and launched it commercially three months later. Chinese companies are believed to have taken cues from the device, and they subsequently made strides in developing their own gadgets. To avoid a repeat this time round, Samsung plans on revealing the latest Galaxy S smartphone at the same time that it drops it on the market.”

This is the first hands-on video of GALAXY Beam from the Mobile World Congress 2012. GALAXY Beam is Samsung’s new projector smartphone that allows you to display and share multimedia content or business information instantly no matter where you are. For more information: http://www.samsungmobilepress.com/2012/02/26/GALAXY-Beam

MobileBurn.com – Samsung had relatively few things to announce at MWC 2012 this year, but one of them was the Galaxy Note 10.1, a larger version of the original Galaxy Note. The Note 10.1 uses the Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1) as its design inspiration (it looks nearly identical), but it adds S Pen capabilities to draw and notate on the screen. The Note 10.1 is powered by a dual-core, 1.4GHz processor and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with Samsung’s TouchWiz enhancements. More info: http://www.mobileburn.com/18681/gallery/samsung-galaxy-note-101-live-impressions

Details for Nokia

BARCELONA, Spain – Nokia announces six new phones and an array of new and updated services, advancing its new strategy and setting the pace for 2012.

Here’s our star-studded line-up for Barcelona 2012.

Nokia Lumia 610

The Nokia Lumia 610 is our most affordable Windows Phone to date – and the fourth we’ve brought to market. It’s aimed at young people who want access to a smartphone experience at the right price. Offering access to social networking, games, Nokia Maps and navigation, web-browsing and Nokia Music, the Lumia 610 comes in four bright colours. It will cost just €189 [$254] before taxes and subsidies, and starts shipping in April.

Nokia Lumia 900

First announced in January for AT&T’s LTE network in the US, the Nokia Lumia 900 will now be available worldwide in an HSPA+ edition. The Dual Carrier HSPA phone will allow for downloads up 42.2 Mbps. With a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display, mobile media never looked so good, while an upgraded battery means there’s no compromise on longevity.

The Nokia 808 PureView extends our leadership in camera phones, with an amazing 41-megapixel sensor, Carl Zeiss optics and brand new pixel over-sampling technology. This means pin-sharp pictures, great low-light performance, yet with the ability to save your images in a suitable file size for social media, MMS and email. Also watch out for full 1080p video recording and exclusive Dolby Headphone technology to enrich the sound of any stereo content.[The Nokia 808 PureView has a current price of €450 [$605]. It will be hitting stores in Q2 2012. – according to a press report]

We’re also introducing three new Nokia Asha mobile phones with new capabilities to bring them to smarter heights than ever. Aimed at urban consumers across the world, the Nokia Asha 302, 202 and 203 offer more than ever in terms of work and play. The Asha 302 is a QWERTY phone with support for Microsoft Exchange synchronisation, a first for Series 40 phones. The Asha 202 and 203 bring touch screens to a lower price point than ever and come with a massive entertainment bundle.
[Asha 202/203 $81 (€60), Asha 302 $128 (€95) according to the press release]

Not satisfied with six new phones, there’s a whole raft of new and improved services. Nokia Drive for Windows Phone will now offer full, offline maps and turn-by-turn navigation. In addition, there’s Nokia Reading, the best e-book experience for Nokia Lumia. And Nokia Life bringing life skills, parenting, education, agriculture and entertainment services to Series 30 and 50 phones in India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Click through for all the in-depth stories from today’s press conference. We’ll be bringing you even more detail, hands-on experiences and interviews with the brains behind these beauties over the course of the week.

Remember that Nokia PureView tease from a few days ago? Well, suddenly it all makes sense. We are indeed looking at an imaging flagship phone and a true successor to the N8. It’s called the 808 PureView and it’s expected to reach Europe in the next quarter for a price of 450 Euros. Before we move on to its craziest feature — the camera, of course! — let’s run down the other key specs: The OS is Symbian Belle; the engine is a 1.3GHz single-core chip; the display is 4-inches corner to corner but its resolution is a Nokia-style 360 x 640 (nHD). There’s 512MB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage that is thankfully expandable via microSD. A Pentaband modem increases the chances of getting a signal while globe-trotting, while data speeds will top out at plain HSPA 14.4Mbps. Now that Carl Zeiss-lensed camera: it handles continuous-focus 1080p, but is claimed to have an incredible sensor resolution of over 41-megapixels when shooting stills — or 34-megapixels for 16:9 images. It’s achieved by some clever sub-pixel interpolation jiggery-pokery that entails five pixels being merged into one to produce a final image with a max resolution of 8-megapixels, but we’ll dig deeper very soon. It’s expected to arrive in May at a price of €450 and if you’re curious, we’ve got a gallery of hands-on images and video for your viewing pleasure. Just follow the break for our first impressions. If you haven’t been sufficiently smacked in the face with the Nokia 808 PureView’s primary selling point, let’s settle the score right now: it’s a phone for camera enthusiasts. As niche devices often go, the sheer optical goodness will come with a few sacrifices. First and foremost, we’re a bit puzzled by Nokia’s choice of Symbian for the phone’s OS. That’s not to say that Belle isn’t a fine operating system, but it’s certainly a polarizing decision — not to mention perplexing, given the company’s ‘all-in’ approach to Windows Phone. Secondly, the 808 PureView is rather chunky, which is emphasized by the bulbous camera pod on the rear. In many ways, Nokia’s phone more closely rivals a point-and-shoot camera in size than a smartphone. That said, it’s still an infinitely pocketable handset, but there are certainly many other high-quality camera phones on the market that don’t demand such sacrifices. If you’re able to move beyond these two major caveats, the 808 PureView is likely a handset that many will come to adore — even if the fondness is learned over time. It features a lovely ClearBlack display, and while it’s decidedly low-res, it’s more than sufficient for Symbian Belle and its associated apps. Below the phone’s screen, users will find an extended rocker that provides access to the home screen, dialer and on / off switch. These physical buttons are combined with additional navigation options that are situated directly above on the touchscreen. The phone also features a headphone jack, micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports along the top — each recessed into a pod of their own — and the volume rocker, screen lock slider and dedicated camera button along the right-hand side. Via engadget

Live from MWC 2012 Phonearena presents Nokia Lumia 610 demo. A heavily rumored handset, the Nokia Lumia 610 was finally announced today here at MWC 2012. As expected, the 610 is the first real budget-friendly Windows Phone, expected to retail for about $255 (EUR 189), which is pretty decent for a Windows Phone. For the full details, see our Nokia Lumia 610 Hands-on Review from MWC 2012 at: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Nokia-Lumia-610-Hands-on-Review_id27389

New Nokia Services at Mobile World Congress [Nokia Conversations‎ blog]:
– [Nokia Maps updated for Windows Phone: make the experience simpler, with fewer intrusive objects and signs to get in the way of where you want to go – and a reduced colour palette to allow the brain to process information more easily]
– Nokia Drive for Windows Phone: full, offline maps and turn-by-turn navigation
– [Nokia Public Transport now available as an app on the Nokia Lumia: to plan fast inner-city routes from point to point, and work out your time of arrival]
– Nokia Reading: the best e-book experience for Nokia Lumia– Nokia Life: life skills, parenting, education, agriculture and entertainment services to Series 30 and 50 phones in India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria

slotMusic and slotRadio has been, like you said, some of that we did in the content area, we don’t continue these products anymore. … However, we did take these security capabilities of using DRM for securing the content into some more interesting applications that we’ve had. One of them, we presented last year. It’s the Muve Music card that Cricket is offering to their subscribers. So it’s based on the very same technology. And actually, it takes the content, that they bring into [indiscernible] this package and they sell to their customers a package of data, voice and content combined. So the technology is coming from us, the content is bought by them.

Muve Music is the first music service designed specifically for the mobile phone. For your regular monthly phone bill which includes unlimited talk, text and web you get unlimited music dowloads with Muve Music. Music is available from all four of the major record labels [Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music] in the world and accounts for millions of songs.

Our customers download about four hundred songs a month. They listen to their device with Muve Music for about two-and-a-half to three hours a day. Included in this are unlimited ringtones and ring back tones which are very very popular with our customers. We’ve got about two hundred thousand customers rigth now of Muve Music and again it’s part of your regular monthly rate plan from Cricket.

The Muve Music service also includes a new technology solution from SanDisk that’s a key part of the service. Muve Music content is downloaded DRM-free over the air to the phone. It is stored and protected on a special flash memory card. This alleviates the need for any cumbersome digital rights management (DRM) scheme and results in a greatly improved user experience, better handset performance and longer battery life.

This is where all the music is. We’re talking millions of songs, ringtones and ringback tones ready for you to seatrch, explore and download. [For the first time anywhere in the U.S. – see the below service announcement.]

My Music

Once you’ve downloaded the music you love, My Music automatically organizes it for you. Listen to songs, create playlists, cut ringtones amd manage your music experience.

Get Social

Get Social is all about connecting with friends and other Muve Music users. You can check out their music collections, download their songs and share what’s on your phone too.

My DJ

This is where you’ll discover new music. My DJ creates playlists for you and sends them to your phone. It does all the work, while you just enjoy the new music.

Shazam™

Hear it. Like it. Identify it. Download it.
Ever hear a song somewhere that you didn’t know but liked?
Press Shazam™ to identify the title and artist instantly. Then download the song with the touch of a button.

Android™-powered

Move Music + Android™ power
– The best selling smartphone OS in the world*
– Access over 250K apps in the Android Marketplace
– Navigate with built-in GPS & Google Maps
– Stay social with Facebook & Twitter
– Only Cricket puts Android and Muve Music together

…– ARPU Increases by More Than $4.00 Year-Over-Year, Primarily Due to Smartphone Customers
…

… said Doug Hutcheson, Leap’s president and chief executive officer. “… ARPU increased to $41.25, reflecting the adoption of smartphones and Muve Music™ devices and related service plans by a third of our voice customers. We continue to pursue initiatives to build on this customer growth, including efforts to increase our distribution presence, enhance our already-compelling device line-up, improve customer awareness through a new nationwide marketing campaign and expand awareness and distribution of our successful Muve Music offering. We are pleased with our progress and believe we have attractive service plans and devices as we move into our stronger selling seasons.”

…

Nearly 50 percent of the Company’s new handset sales in the third quarter of 2011 were for smartphones and Muve Music devices and approximately 10 percent of the Company’s customer base upgraded their handsets during the quarter, typically to better devices coupled with higher-ARPU service plans.

…

Capital Expenditures

Capital expenditures during the third quarter of 2011 were $103.1 million.

Total capital expenditures for 2011 are expected to be between $425 million and $475 million, primarily to support the ongoing maintenance, development and growth of the Company’s network in its operating markets and the initial deployment of LTE network technology.

Annual capital expenditures for 2012 to support the ongoing maintenance and development of the Company’s network and other business assets are expected to be in the mid-teens as a percentage of annual service revenues.

The Company currently plans to deploy LTE across approximately two-thirds of its current network footprint over the next two to three years, with a commercial trial market scheduled to be launched in late 2011. The Company plans to cover approximately 25 million POPs with LTE network technology in 2012. Aggregate capital expenditures for LTE deployment are expected to be less than $10 per covered POP, excluding capitalized interest. Approximately half of the estimated capital expenditures for LTE deployment are included in the amounts estimated to be necessary to support the ongoing maintenance and development of the Company’s network. The actual amount the Company spends to deploy LTE will depend upon multiple factors, including the scope and pace of the Company’s deployment activities.

…

Other Quarterly Highlights

Announced a major retail expansion that will result in Cricket products and services being available to consumers nationwide. By mid-November, Cricket’s innovative products and services are expected to be launched in key major retailers including Best Buy, select Walmart locations, Dollar General and through one of America’s most popular interactive multi-channel retailers, the Home Shopping Network.

Introduced Muve Music, new, nationwide all-inclusive service plans and new Android handsets, including the introduction of the Samsung Vitality and the ZTE Score into more than 1,300 Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile specialty stores nationwide. These new products enable Cricket to bring its industry-leading value proposition to an expanded nationwide audience.

Surpassed the 200,000 customer threshold for Muve Music in early September, a doubling of its subscriber base in less than 60 days. In addition, the Company recently gained its 250,000th Muve Music customer.

Announced Muve First™ and Muve Headliner™, two new monthly music programs exclusively for Muve Music customers. Muve First offers subscribers exclusive content before any other digital music service. Muve Headliner is a monthly program that features A-list artists and provides Muve Music users with exclusive and featured music.

Launched the Huawei Ascend II, the successor to Cricket’s highly-successful deployment of its first low-cost Android device, the Ascend, which was launched in October 2010.

Introduced two feature-phones, the Samsung Comment and the Kyocera Luno.

…

About Leap

Leap provides innovative, high-value wireless services to a young and ethnically diverse customer base. With the value of unlimited wireless services as the foundation of its business, Leap pioneered its Cricket service. Cricket products and services are available nationwide through company-owned stores, dealers, national retailers and at MyCricket.com. Through its affordable, flat-rate service plans, Cricket offers customers a choice of unlimited voice, text, data and mobile Web services. Headquartered in San Diego, Calif., Leap is traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “LEAP.” For more information, please visit www.leapwireless.com.

Amazon.com customers now have the opportunity to order Muve Music on either the Samsung Vitality or the ZTE Score Android phones. In addition to the Vitality and the Score, the Huawei Pillar [intro at $69.99: Sept 22, 2011] feature phone is available now and will soon be joined by other Cricket feature phones including the ZTE Chorus, Kyocera Domino [intro at $99.99: Jul 20, 2010] and the Samsung Chrono [intro at $39.99: June 10, 2011].
[only the ZTE Chorus feature phone is a Cricket Muve Music Phone]

With the Muve Music Smartphone rate plan, Amazon.com customers will enjoy unlimited song downloads, ringtones, and ringback tones, as well as nationwide calling; unlimited text, picture, video messaging and 3G mobile data; mobile video; data back-up, and 411 assistance all for just $55 per month. The feature phones will be available on the recently announced Cricket PAYGo service plans at $25 and $35 per month. Both plans include unlimited text, picture and video messaging and unlimited mobile web. The $25 plan includes 300 minutes of US calling per month while the $35 plan includes 1,000 minutes of US calling.

Operating on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform powered by an 800MHz processor, the fast and affordable Samsung Vitality is easy to use and features Muve Music as well as the Android Market™, Gmail™, Google Maps™ and Google Talk™.

The ZTE Score is a full-featured Android smartphone providing speed and ease of use, making it particularly appealing for those customers looking to upgrade to a device with today’s newest technologies.

The ZTE Chorus™ is ideal for value-conscious consumers looking for a single device to simultaneously manage their mobile and music needs. The bar-style feature phone delivers high functionality with 3G web browsing capabilities and 600 megahertz of processing power while serving as an ideal platform for Cricket’s innovative and unlimited Muve Musicservice. The ZTE Chorus incorporates SRS WOW HD technology for advanced audio playback quality and a dynamic 3D entertainment experience with a deep, rich bass and high-frequency clarity. Users can customize their sound preferences with SRS sound settings that complement popular music styles including acoustic, blues, hip hop, pop and rock.

The ZTE Chorus, with an MSRP of $119.99, is available for as low as $39.99 [$49.99] for a limited time at www.mycricket.com, Cricket branded retail stores and dealers.

With the $55 per month Muve Music planfor the ZTE Chorus, Cricket Wireless customers will enjoy unlimited song downloads, ringtones, and ringback tones, as well as unlimited text, picture, and video messaging, 3G mobile data, mobile video, data back-up, and 411 assistance.

Muve Music is the first unlimited music service to be included as part of a wireless rate plan and now has more than 270,000 customers. By applying its philosophy of unlimited services and value innovation, Cricket and Muve Music have given their customers a new music experience that ranks high in customer satisfaction.

Comparing to the previous version, what improvements and characteristics does Android 2.3 operating system have?

Large-scale improvement on the overall performance.

3G network sharing;

Support Flash;

App2sdfunction;

Brand new application store;

Development of more Web application API interfaces.

…

How to add Android account in Chorus Smart Phone?

The Phone doesn’t support this function.

[vs. the Cricket ZTE Score true Android smartphone:

Method 1. When you use the handset for the first time, the handset will prompt the user to enter a g-mail account to bind with the handset.
Method 2. It doesn’t matter if you forget to bind a g-mail account with the handset at the first time, and you can also go to Menu—Settings—Accounts & sync to select “Add account”.
X500 Smart Phone doesn’t support g-mail account binding because it has no GMS application. ]

How to install the applications to my Android handset?

You can’t connect to the PC to install the applications through 91 handset assistant because there is no built-in driver in the phone. You can download APK application alone into the SD card in advance, insert the SD card into the phone, and install apk application in Myfiles on the desktop.

[vs. the Cricket ZTE Score true Android smartphone:

Please use 91 handset assistant for Android newly published on the 91 handset website. ]

…

Does Android belong to Linux operation [sic] system?

Strictly speaking, Android doesn’t belong to Linux operation system and it runs based on Linux2.6. kernel. The levels of Android system can be described like this, the bottom is Linux, the middle is java virtual machine called Dalvik, and the top is Android running time library. The applications in Android system are the Java applications running on Dalvik, but Dalvik is running in Linux. Therefore, it can be said that Android is the operating system that runs on the Linux operating system, and Android itself is not any version of Linux.

What is “Android Market”?

The new Android Marketis described as an “open content distribution system”, which can help Android handset end-users search, purchase, download and install all kinds of contents. Unlike the platform of Microsoft and Apple, Android Market can provide users with diversified contents, including the contents from every large media company and the programs from amateur developers.

The recently launched Samsung Vitality smartphone will be available for $199.99 (MSRP). In addition, Muve Music will be available on the newly-launched ZTE Score smartphone for $129.99 (MSRP). A new Muve Music feature phone will also be introduced in Best Buy, the ZTE Chorus, which will be available later this year at $99.99 (MSRP).
[It has been introduced 2 month later at $119.99 but for a limited time (as an introductory promotion) it is available for $39.99 only (so after that $99.99 could be well established).]

With the Muve Music Smartphone rate plan, Best Buy customers will enjoy unlimited song downloads, ringtones, and ringback tones, as well as nationwide calling; unlimited text, picture, video messaging and 3G mobile data; mobile video; data back-up, and 411 assistance all for just $55 per month. The Muve Music feature phone rate plan in Best Buy will be available for $45 per month.

In addition, Cricket is introducing two additional standard feature phones at Best Buy, the Huawei Pillar ($69.99 MSRP) and the Samsung Chrono($39.99 MSRP). The Pillar features a QWERTY keyboard for fast and easy text and picture messaging. Customers can enjoy easy talk and test with one simple flip with the Samsung Chrono.

Both feature phones will be available on two new Cricket PAYGo service plans at $25 and $35 per month. Both plans include unlimited text, picture and video messaging and unlimited mobile web. The $25 plan includes 300 minutes of US calling per month while the $35 plan includes 1,000 minutes of US calling.

Optimized for a superior music experience, the Samsung Vitality is Cricket’s first Muve Music enabled Android smartphone. Operating on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform powered by an 800MHz processor, the fast and affordable Samsung Vitality is easy to use and features Muve Music as well as the Android Market™, Gmail™, Google Maps™ and Google Talk™. The Samsung Vitality comes preloaded with a special Muve Music 4GB SanDisk flash memory card, which holds up to 3,000 songs and has 1GB set aside for other multimedia content such as photos and videos. An 8GB Muve Music memory card will be available for purchase and holds up to 6,000 songs from the Muve Music service.

Other key features include:

Real web browsing at 3G speeds

3.5″ HVGA Touchscreen display

3.2MP camera/camcorder

Stereo Bluetooth wireless technology

Wi-Fi®

Access to more than 250,000 apps through the Android Market™

Social networking capabilities

Email applications for both consumer and business email

Voice search

With the Muve Music Smartphone plan, Cricket Wireless customers will enjoy unlimited song downloads, ringtones, and ringback tones, as well as unlimited nationwide calling, text, picture, and video messaging, 3G mobile data, mobile video, data back-up, and 411 assistance all for just $65 per month.

…

Muve Music will be available next week at Cricket company-owned stores and at www.mycricket.com, as well as through select partner retail outlets. The Cricket Muve Music wireless unlimited plan is $65 per month on the Samsung Vitality and $55 per month on the Samsung Suede. The Samsung Vitality has an M.S.R.P of $219.99, but will be available with a $20 instant rebate. The Samsung Suede has an M.S.R.P. of $199.99, but prices may vary by market and by promotional programs.

~ First ZTE Smartphone Launched by Cricket ~

Cricket is the first carrier to launch the ZTE Score, which will be available beginning Sunday, September 25 in Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile locations across the United States and will soon be available through Cricket stores and dealers.

The ZTE Score is a full-featured Android smartphone providing speed and ease of use, making it particularly appealing for those customers looking to upgrade to a device with today’s newest technologies. The phone is based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) comes with 600 MHz of processing speed and features a 3.5″ HVGA capacitive touch display, accelerometer and virtual qwerty keypad, 3.2MP camera/camcorder, WiFi capable, 3G real web browsing and XT9 Trace for easy text entry. The ZTE Score also includes the new and innovative Muve Music service, and it also offers access to more than 200,000 apps on the Android market, Google Maps and Navigator, Email, MyAccount, Cricket411, and much more. The smartphone will be available for $129.99 (MSRP).

Cricket’s Muve Music introduction

Muve Music is like no other mobile music service. It was designed exclusively for the mobile phone. With Cricket’s Muve Music rate plan, there are no download fees, no monthly music subscriptions, no streaming music that impacts customers’ data and no contracts or credit cards are required.

Muve Music was created by Cricket in collaboration with the four major record labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music, and technology partners Samsung Mobile and SanDisk. Muve Music will launch with a robust catalog of music content from each of the four labels.

Muve Music will be available in January 2011 on the Samsung Suede™ (SCH-r710). It features a dedicated music button, prominently displayed on the front of the device that takes customers to the Muve Music experience with one touch. Other highlights include:

~ Innovative, New Digital Music Service Muve Music™ will Debut
at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

SAN DIEGO – December 20, 2010 – Cricket Communications Inc., a leading provider of innovative and value-driven wireless services and a wholly owned subsidiary of Leap Wireless International, Inc. (NASDAQ:LEAP), today announcedit is the first U.S. wireless carrier to offer consumers unlimited music as part of a new wireless rate plan. This product offering features an innovative new digital music service called Muve Music. It is the first music experience designed specifically for the mobile phone.

“Cricket was the first to introduce an unlimited wireless rate plan and now we are the first to introduce a new unlimited wireless rate plan that includes unlimited music. With Muve Music, Cricket is bringing together the best of wireless and music in a way no one has ever done before,” said Doug Hutcheson, president and chief executive officer of Cricket Communications. “Our recent experience with smartphones has shown us that the right products offered at the right price will be successful with value-oriented customers. We are excited and confident that Muve Music will provide a superior mobile experience for customers who want to create a personal music experience without being tethered to a computer. The result of our collaboration with the music industry during the past two years allows unlimited music downloads, ringtones and ringback tones to be included in a wireless service for a flat monthly rate. We believe the high quality Muve Music experience is the right product at the right time for value oriented customers.”

“Muve Music from Cricket is a game changer for everyone,” said Ben Bajarin, director of Consumer Technology Practice at Creative Strategies. “By tightly integrating the music service into the handset and the billing plan everyone in the value chain benefits and consumers have a complete music service where the phone is the hub not the PC.”

The Muve Music Rate Plan

For just $55 per month, Muve Music customers will get the following features on Cricket’s nationwide 3G network:

Unlimited nationwide calling

Unlimited nationwide text, picture & video messaging

Unlimited global text messaging

Unlimited 3G mobile Web

Unlimited email

Unlimited data back up

Unlimited video

And for the first time anywhere in the U.S.

Unlimited full track downloads

Unlimited ringtones

Unlimited ringback tones

With Cricket’s Muve Music rate plan, there are no download fees and no monthly music subscriptions. Customers’ data plans will not be impacted by streaming music over the wireless network and customers won’t be required to use a credit card to purchase music. Unlimited Muve Music is included in the flat rate monthly wireless service plan.

Introducing the Muve Music Service Experience

Two years ago Cricket, in collaboration with key music industry and technology partners, began to create new IP and design a new music experience to meet the needs of customers for whom the phone, not their computer, is the center of their digital life. Muve Music brings the functionality that resides on many online digital music services to the palm of the customer’s hand. The service also delivers innovative new features and functionality that only a wireless network and true mobile offering can provide. With Cricket’s new service there are no cables, no drivers, no synching and no complexity. Everything happens over Cricket’s nationwide 3G network to deliver a robust music experience to music lovers on the go.

Muve Music will have a robust catalog of music content which includes the four major record labels: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music. This groundbreaking new music service and business model was brought about through a unique collaboration, led by Cricket, between the music industry labels, as well as technology partners Samsung Mobile and SanDisk.

“When we first began working with Cricket to model this new service, we quickly realized what a great opportunity it was to develop the first-ever US unlimited music service that comes bundled with a mobile voice, text, and web plan and is fully integrated into the phone itself,” stated David Ring, executive vice president of business development and business affairs for Universal Music Group, eLabs. “There has been nothing like this product or business model ever attempted in this country.”

“Cricket has developed a very compelling experience for their customers which is extremely well integrated into the device and wireless service plan through a new business model that establishes a great approach to partnership in the mobile music space,” said Michael Nash, executive vice president, digital strategy and business development, Warner Music Group. “We’re thrilled to work with their talented team and hope their innovative Muve Music service proves to be influential as we continue to work with the wireless industry to transform the way consumers experience music on mobile phones.”

“Muve Music is a first-of-its-kind solution for US consumers,” said Thomas Hesse, president, global digital business, U.S. sales and corporate strategy, Sony Music Entertainment. “The inclusion of a premium digital music service in the wireless plan is an exciting new opportunity to expand the market for commercial digital music.”

“Muve Music is a truly new kind of mobile music experience, and we’re excited about its potential to connect fans to the artists they love in a unique and innovative way,” said Mark Piibe, executive vice president of global business development, EMI Music.

The Samsung Suede Debuts as the First Muve Music Phone

At launch, Muve Music will be available on the Samsung Suede™ (SCH-r710), marking the unique integration of an innovative new music service and a phone from a leading global handset manufacturer. The Suede is a high-end 3G multi-media devicewith a full 3-inch touchscreen display, HTML web browser, virtual QWERTY keyboard and an easy-to-navigate user interface. Most notably, it features a dedicated music button, prominently displayed on the front of the device, that takes customers to the Muve Music experience with one touch.

The Muve Music service also includes a new technology solution from SanDisk that’s a key part of the service. Muve Music content is downloaded DRM-free over the air to the phone. It is stored and protected on a special flash memory card. This alleviates the need for any cumbersome digital rights management (DRM) scheme and results in a greatly improved user experience, better handset performance and longer battery life.

Muve Music: Meeting the Customers’ Needs

Muve Music is Cricket’s latest innovation. It had its genesis in 2007 when the Company observed interesting customer behavior surrounding its newly launched basic ringback tone service. Within a few quarters of launch, Cricket was generating more revenue for the music industry from ringback tones than most U.S. wireless carriers even though Cricket had a much smaller customer base. Continued analysis led the Company to conclude that Cricket’s customers loved music but they were not having a good music experiencethus prompting the development of Muve Music to provide customers with a way to get the music they love on their wireless phones through a flat-rate plan served by a network they can rely upon.

See Muve Music at CES

Muve Music and the Samsung Suede will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, January 6-10, 2011 and can been seen at South Hall 4, upper level, Room S210 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The service will be available in January 2011, at select Cricket company-owned stores and at http://www.mycricket.com, as well as through select partner retail outlets. The Cricket Muve Music wireless unlimited plan is $55 per month. The Samsung Suede has an M.S.R.P. of $199.

Cricket is the pioneer of simple and affordable unlimited wireless services with no long-term commitments or credit checks required serving more than 5 million customers in 35 states and the District of Columbia. Cricket offers wireless voice and broadband Internet services over the latest technology, high-quality, all-digital 3G CDMA2000 1X and 1xEV-DO wireless network. Cricket’s nationwide wireless voice service plans include unlimited anytime minutes, unlimited U.S. long distance, unlimited text and picture messaging, unlimited text to Mexico, unlimited Mobile Web, unlimited directory assistance, as well as a variety of calling features and feature-rich mobile applications such as popular games, ringtones and wallpapers. Cricket Broadband provides unlimited Internet access anywhere within Cricket’s coverage areas at speeds comparable to DSL. For more information on Cricket, visit http://www.mycricket.com. Cricket is offered by Leap Wireless International, Inc., headquartered in San Diego, Calif. For more information on Leap, visit www.leapwireless.com.

Updates:
– 3 Minutes with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop [YouTube, Oct 27, 2011]
Why a sequencing of launches? US operators have nothing to do with that. N9 is for learning a lot. Not answered yet: elements of UX and Qt environment in the future. Nothing clear for “the other ecosystem” [presumably the Android] what is the standard UX. Nokia sees the Windows 8 opportunity, commonality with Windows smartphone for itself as well. Microsoft bet on HTML5 is also important for the forming of the ecosystem. One is clear it is more than just the phones … it is also search, advertising, unified communications (like Skype), business productivity, gaming, music … that’s the experience people are looking for.

[About N9 and Qt:] Elements of N9. The things that really define that product you will see continue on. The reason we continue with N9 is because we believe we could learn a lot about certain things that actually make the N9 unique in the way that it is. … What remains unanswered, and will remain unanswered for today, is when I say ‘elements of the user experience’ or ‘the Qt environment’. What does that mean? That’s still something you’ll see ahead from Nokia.

…

In terms of (Windows Phone) doesn’t allow for the Sense UI or whatever, I would suggest that one of the biggest challenges facing that particular ecosystem is the fact that there is more and more of that going on. And when I go into the store and look at what that brand was supposed to stand for, I’m not quite seeing it — it’s just unclear what the standard is for the user experience.

…

The user experience of Windows 8 is essentially a supercharged version of the Nokia Lumia experience that you saw on stage today. And you see the parallels and opportunity for commonality from a user perspective. You say wow, this is more than just smartphones, there’s a broader opportunity here. And clearly we see that broader opportunity as well, without specifically commenting on what that may mean in the future.

Nokia Lumia 800 Presentation and Hands On at Nokia World 2011. Stephen Elop: “The first real Windows Phone”. It took a third less time to produce the 800 and 710 than previous Nokia Smartphones. The body is all one colour throughout as well. If you did happen to fall foul of gravity and drop it, the body wouldn’t show its scarring half as much as if it was anodized aluminium for example. The screen is lit up by an AMOLED Clear Black Display, fortified with curved Gorilla glass to make your gestures feel smooth like silk. The Gorilla glass is perfect for protecting the Lumia 800 against scratches when it’s in your pocket with coins and keys.

Nokia will release new Mango models powered by dual-core CPUs with additional functionalities, including the support of NFC technology, in 2012, the sources added.

Nokia should rely on handset ODMs in Taiwan such as Compal Communications and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH) as back-up units, said the sources, noting that Taiwan-based ODMs have enough expertise in the development of Windows Mobile phones and have long been in cooperation with Nokia.

The launch of Mango phones offer a chance for Nokia to build up a complete supply chain that will also include Taiwan makers of optical lenses, modules, flat panels, chassis and cases so as to compete effectively with other handset vendors using supply chains in China or Korea, the sources commented.

The first Nokia Lumia [the word ‘Lumia’ is the term coined by 20th Century Artist Thomas Wilfred to refer to art created from light] smartphones

First two smartphones based on Windows Phone introduce a range of new experiences designed to make everyday moments more amazing.

Nokia Lumia 800
The stunningly social Nokia Lumia 800 features head-turning design, vivid colors (cyan, magenta and black) and the best social and Internet performance, with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9. It features a 3.7 inch AMOLED [PenTile RGBG from Samsung] ClearBlack curved display blending seamlessly into the reduced body design, and a 1.4 GHz processor with hardware acceleration and a graphics processor. The Nokia Lumia 800 contains an instant-share camera experience based on leading Carl Zeiss optics, HD video playback, 16GB of internal user memory and 25GB of free SkyDrive storage for storing images and music. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Lumia 800 will be approximately 420 EUR [US$ 585], excluding taxes and subsidies.

Nokia Lumia 710
The purposely built, no-nonsense Nokia Lumia 710 can be personalized with exchangeable back covers and thousands of apps to bring the Lumia experience to more people around the world. The Nokia Lumia 710 is designed for instant social & image sharing, and the best browsing experience with IE9. It is available in black and white with black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow back covers. With the same 1.4 GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor as the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 delivers high performance at an affordable price. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Lumia 710 will be approximately 270 EUR [US$ 376], excluding taxes and subsidies.

Both smartphones include signature Nokia experiences optimized for Windows Phone, including Nokia Drive, which delivers a full-fledged personal navigation device (PND) with free, turn-by-turn navigation and dedicated in-car-user-interface; and Nokia Music introducing MixRadio, a free, global, mobile music-streaming application that delivers hundreds of channels of locally-relevant music. In an update delivered later this year, Nokia Lumia users will also gain the ability to create personalized channels from a global catalogue of millions of tracks. Also integrated in Nokia Music is Gigfinder, providing the ability to search for live local music for a complete end-to-end music experience, as well as the ability to share discoveries on social networks and buy concert tickets also coming in the Nokia Music software update delivered later this year.

Completing the ultimate mobile audio offering, Nokia also introduced the on-ear Nokia Purity HD Stereo Headset by Monster and the in-ear Nokia Purity Stereo Headset by Monster, co-designed and co-developed by Monster, a recognized leader in high performance audio. Both products provide a fresh listening experience and are the first output of the exclusive long-term partnership between Nokia and Monster, intended to introduce a range of premium audio accessories to reflect the outstanding quality and bold style of the Lumia range.

The new Nokia Lumia 800 is now available in select countries for pre-order on www.nokia.com and is scheduled to roll-out across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in November, with 31 leading operators and retailers providing unprecedented marketing support in those first six countries. It is scheduled to be available in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwanbefore the end of the year, and in further markets in early 2012.

The Nokia Lumia 710 is scheduled to be available first in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan toward the end of the year alongside the Nokia Lumia 800, before becoming available in further markets in early 2012.

Nokia also announced its plans to introduce a portfolio of products into the US in early 2012 and into mainland China in the first half of 2012. In addition to the existing products, which include coverage for WCDMA and HSPA, Nokia also plans LTE and CDMA products to address specific local market requirements.

Three Unique Differentiators

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/tTY5an is not your everyday phone. With access to millions of songs in Nokia Music and MixRadio, your ears need never be bored again. With the best in mobile phone entertainment you get more than just click and play. You can create your own channels based on the artists you like, or let MixRadio create a personalised experience based on the music you already have in your library. Throw in the ability to record and watch HD video wherever you are, and you’ll be entertained for hours. Music and Entertainment is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Nokia unveiled its first two Windows Phone smartphones this morning at its Nokia World conference in London: the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710.

Both will include an app called Nokia Music which represents the company’s latest digital music initiative.

During the keynote presentation at the event, Nokia SVP Kevin Shields borrowed one of Apple’s famous phrases to trumpet the simplicity of Nokia Music: “No signup. No subscription. No login. No password. No nothing. It just works!”

What is ‘it’ though? Well, the key feature of the Nokia Music app is called MixRadio. It provides a host of streaming music mixes – playlists of tracks – which can also be cached locally on the device. Sorted by genre, the playlists will be updated every week or so by Nokia’s music team with new tracks.

Music Ally got hands on with the app directly after the keynote, and was shown another feature of MixRadio: its Pandora-style ability to create personal mixes for people when they search for a specific artist. These too can be downloaded to the Lumia phones for offline play.

“I think we have finally solved the mobile music problem. I don’t know how to make it any easier,” said Shields during the keynote. But what about licensing? Afterwards, we asked the Nokia staffer who was demonstrating the app where it stands regarding licences.

He said that Nokia will be building on its existing relationships with rightsholders for its a la carte store and other music services, but said the specific deals for MixRadio are still being negotiated and will hopefully be in place for the launch of the new phones in November.

As with Pure Digital’s announcement of its Pure Music service earlier this week, it could be seen as risky to unveil a new app before the licensing deals are sealed.

There is a music panel session later today at Nokia World with representatives from PIAS and Warner Music International, so we’ll aim to sneak in a question about it.

Andre Kuhn, the Product Manager for Nokia Drive on WP7 gives us a demo of the Nokia Drive app.

Nokia Drive has been crafted for the new Nokia Lumia phones using the years of expertise we have accumulated in location-based services. This resulting translation for Windows Phone is an application specifically designed to make navigation effortless.

Driving while referring to your smartphone’s sat-nav is not always easy, especially in busy traffic, when you need it most. That’s why we simplified the user interface of Nokia Drive, so that you can focus on features and information you need most.

A map of your position, the direction to take, your speed and the distance to your destination are essential elements of Nokia Drive. So we’ve made them easy to read from the screen of your Nokia Lumia.

Nokia Drive also has neat features like support for 2D and 3D maps, a night mode and satellite view. And, to make it easier for you to find your next destination, Nokia Drive supports type-ahead suggestions and search history. You can also swipe between search results.

Most importantly, you can save on data costs with Nokia Drive because you can preload country maps. Fast, reliable, nice to look at and available in more than 100 countries, you are going to love our vector maps.

Nokia Drive comes preinstalled on Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710 and is available in almost 50 languages.

Of course, Nokia Drive is also available for smartphones with Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle, and for Nokia N9 which also support Nokia Car Mode and MirrorLink. Read more about our location-based apps on the Nokia Maps Blog.

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/v8hEox is not your everyday, everyday phone. Want to feel like a local anywhere? Nokia Drive and Nokia Maps give you comprehensive mobile navigation and the insider knowledge to make it happen. With support across 95 countries, you’ll get accurate turn-by-turn directions to the destination of your choice, as well as information on all the cool places to visit when you get there. Drive and Maps is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

You might already be familiar with Nokia Maps on other platforms: it’s currently available for Symbian, MeeGo but also on the web and on your iOS or Android mobile browser.

Whilst Nokia Drive has been specifically designed for your effortless driving experience, Nokia Maps lets you see where you are and discover places nearby in an instant. In other words Nokia Maps is your perfect companion if you want to explore the world around you, no matter whether you are a local or not.

With Nokia Maps you can easily find a place because it supports intuitive auto-complete suggestions and search history.

However, if you are unsure of where to go next, Nokia Maps helps you decide which place to pick by including reviews and photos from over 50 guides & local content providers.

And that’s not all. With just a tap you can now see which other places are close to the one you’ve just selected. So, after a good meal at a restaurant you know where to go for a drink without going to the other side of town.

Getting to the place you have selected is very easy with Nokia Maps because you get smart directions for drive, walk and public transport. It puts you in charge of navigation. You decide where to go and how to get there.

These are only a few of the things that are keeping us busy bringing you the best location-based experience.

Nokia Live View, for instance, which is currently in beta for Nokia Symbian smartphones, is our augmented reality application. Wherever you are, just open the camera of your smartphone to discover more of what’s around you. And if you are into outdoor activities, you will be thrilled to know that we are working on a specific application for you, called Nokia Tracks. With more than 80% of the planet covered by non-urban areas, we know that you have a lot to explore. This is why we want to give you the ability to record where your route has taken you so far, your current direction, your altitude, and how fast you are going. Stay tuned to know more about the development of Nokia Tracks!

The most advanced features of Nokia Maps are also available on Nokia smartphones with Symbian Anna, Symbian Belle, and MeeGo. You can read more on the Nokia Maps Blog. Nokia Maps is going to be available soon in the Marketplace for your Windows Phone. We can’t wait for you to let us know what you think about it.

Free ESPN Sports Hub: shown only as a “sneak peak” of the future service which will come exclusive to Nokia

This unique collaboration between our two companies on the ESPN Hub has been a truly global effort that will see us continue to work closely together in the months ahead. Nokia not only provides a great distribution platform, but they’re also a driver of innovation, which allows us to create an experience that enables ESPN to better serve sports fans around the world.

Russell Wolff, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, ESPN International

Nokia’s third and final innovation for its own branded Windows Phone devices will be in the sports field. Nokia Sports will be integrated with ESPN Sports Huband will highlight Windows Phone 7′s panoramic screens to provide highlights, news, scores, and team information.

Users can pin a league or a team back to the start page on the Metro UI as a live tile. This way, users can have quick access to their sports teams.

A Better Representation of the General WP7 Differentiators

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/sjGgMl is not your everyday phone. Combining the best in stylish hardware and the best in stylish software, you get a colourful touch screen phone that looks great and feels greater. The People Hub is where being social starts. You’ll be able to see all the latest updates from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn straight from the Start screen. Whether you’re on the go and looking for what’s new, searching for someone’s contact details, taking pictures, or starting conversations, everything’s right where you want it to be. Close at hand. People and Messaging is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/ugel2T is not your everyday phone. Working on the go is a necessity these days. Thankfully, Nokia Lumia 800 comes with Microsoft Office Mobile built in, helping you meet any deadline regardless of your location. Whatever email account you use, it’s incredibly simple to set up mail on this phone and have the latest from your inbox available in just a click. Office and Mail is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/w4YsUA is not your everyday, everyday phone. What’s a smartphone without an app or two? Marketplace is the place you’ll find the best smartphone apps, games and more on the Nokia Lumia 800. And with Xbox Live available out-of-the-box, you’ll have access to endless hours of fun. Great if you find yourself need of a little light entertainment on the move. Marketplace and Games is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Experience the amazing everyday and see just why the Nokia Lumia 800 http://nokia.ly/sjGgMl is not your everyday, everyday phone. Access to the internet is a must have. And getting where you want to go online has never been more important. Thankfully, browsing doesn’t get much better than it is on the Nokia Lumia 800. With Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5 you get the same experience you already know and love from your desktop on your phone. Browsing and Search is one in a series of 6 quick introduction demos to the wonderful world of Nokia Lumia. Each video highlights different hubs and features, letting you dive deeper into the world of Nokia with Windows Phone. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Introducing the new Nokia Lumia – http://nokia.ly/sTL7b1 – Welcome to The Amazing Everyday. Nokia Lumia is the latest smartphone that puts your people first. It’s where being social starts. With updates from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at your fingertips straight from the Start screen, you’re never far away from seeing what’s new. And with free drive navigation, super-fast browsing, access to millions of songs for your mobile music collection, and the ability to run Microsoft Office on the run — Nokia Lumia is packed with features that will make your life easier, faster, funner. So, whether you’re on the go, searching for someone’s contact details, taking pictures, or starting conversations, everything’s right where you want it to be. Close at hand. Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

10:20 JJ: The Amazing Everyday campaign. “Everyday can be amazing. You can do everyday things in amazing ways. We are going to fill the world with tiles. It’s about time someone offers an alternative smartphone UI.”

The tagline is meant to emphasize optimism and new experiences. Overman said in every channel where Nokia is selling its Windows Phone devices, Nokia will launch a kind of viral marketing campaign – think people dressed as Windows Phone tiles, DJ booths at bus stations – to drive interest in Windows Phone. The design of stores where the devices will be sold will reflect the mutli-colored tiles that mark Windows Phone’s user interface.

10:23 JJ: “We’re going to invade cities. A journey which is leading people to a store. We’re making marketing that is contagious. That people will take photos of.”

Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone http://nokia.ly/vZ6q75 Hidden away in the everyday are billions of little adventures. The new Nokia Alpha 800 smartphone makes it easier to find them, take part in them and share them. Daily routines are transformed. Life gets richer. ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me today’ gets said a lot more. And of course, the everyday doesn’t feel everyday anymore. See more of The Amazing Everyday at http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn Learn more about the Nokia Lumia 800 here http://nokia.ly/vZ6q75 Follow us on Twitter here – http://nokia.ly/j7zixs Or connect with us on Facebook here – http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

An ex-American footballer who was once security for New Kids On The Block. He can cook. He can dance. He can serve up the amazing everyday on plate. See more of The Amazing Everyday here: http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Take one car park in downtown LA. Add five pioneers in wind-assisted recreation. And let them show off their new sport, wind skating, check out more at http://windsskate.com See more of The Amazing Everyday here: http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

We found Marciano Darling doing his Gangster Ironing online. We invited him from The Bahamas to LA to be in our film. He agreed, but like all good gangsters only if he could bring his mum. See more of The Amazing Everyday here: http://nokia.ly/hWCnbn

Nokia Maps Updates

With Nokia Maps 3D (http://nokia.ly/snhwAs) it’s almost like being there. You might be wondering how we manged to get such a high level of detail. It certainly isn’t easy, but it’s easy to explain.

First of all, a nice surprise for the location fans among you: the wonderful Nokia Maps 3D is going to be 100% 3D and 0% plugin. If you want to give it a try, it’s been available for a while. All you need to do is point your browser (only Chrome at the moment, other browsers are being tested) to http://maps.nokia.com/webgl

New additions to Nokia Maps

– Plugin-free 3D maps- Heat maps in 56 countries

– Public Transport guides- Explore Places

Since we first launched Nokia Maps 3D, many of you were eager to know exactly how we are able to provide such a photorealistic experience. With you in mind, we prepared the video at the top of the page that helps to explain all.

But of course maps.nokia.com is not only about 3D where you can feel like you were at any part of the world. Which is why we are introducing editorial pages for more than 50 cities around the world. Now you can discover all the cool places in, for instance, London, New York City, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, get the latest weather forecasts and Lonely Planet suggestions in one place.

And to make you feel more like a local anywhere, we increased the coverage of heat mapsto 56 cities. However, that’s not all. We have one more feature we would like to highlight: public transport.

Now, in more than 420 cities you can plan your journey from A to B also with underground, light rail and similar options. In more than 30 of those cities you also get timetable information to know exactly when you have to leave home.

GLOBAL – Ever since the new-look Nokia Maps was unveiled last Tuesday, we’ve been playing around with the new features. If we’re not taking a 3D look at the new cities, we’re zooming into different places to see where the local hotspots are by using the heat maps. Want to know more about how these features work? Then read on.

Nokia Maps 3D

Nokia Maps has been a great service offered by Nokia for a couple of years now. We’ve seen it grow from an on-device service to one that now works on the Web. As good as Nokia Maps is, it’s the new feature that’s blowing people’s minds. Nokia Maps 3Dshows you the world in a full 360º perspective – or at least certain cities of the world, for now.

In order to capture the images of a city, specialised camera equipment takes an image a second of the same object, up to 100 times, each at a different angle. It’s at this point the images are automatically joined together to form the 3D object by clever image processing software and those images in turn are joined to the previous image resulting in a seamless tapestry of 3D mapping-goodness.

There are currently 23 cities that have been turned into 3D models with a plan to create 3D representations of everywhere in the world. The practicalities of this can prove difficult, though, particularly with local laws which might prevent our cameras from flying overhead.

Here’s two images of a 3D Buckingham Palace in London with a north view and a south view – Select the images for a close-up.

Heat Maps

Heat maps on Nokia Maps works for one reason, and that’s down to the Points of Interest (POI) that are stored on the Ovi Places directory. Let’s say you want to go out in London for the night, but you’re not sure where the buzzis, or where’s popular. The heat map is an overlay that shows you a darker red colour for more popular – or POI dense – places, with the orange and yellow colours representing the less dense places. Somewhere still exciting, but maybe more intimate and secluded.

In order to achieve this visualisation and not have every single POI on the map, Nokia selected some of the premium POIs. This is due to the fact that people can add their own public place to the map which saves to the directory, and we wouldn’t want to spend the day visiting other people’s houses or offices, would we? The premium POIs are provided from services, such as Lonely Planet, WCities and Michelin to name a few, and these bring reviews and some great photos, too. So you know what to expect before you set off out on your travel to the hotspot.

As the POIs are constantly being updated to add more great restaurants, bars, sight-seeing spots or shopping outlets, this heat map will evolve over time, too. So we’ll expect to see this feature to continually grow and evolve and maybe even see the hotspots shift, slightly.

Here’s what the London Explore local sights heat map looks like with one of the photos selected – Click the image to zoom in and for more details.

You can see there’s the option to expand the window so you can see more details of that place, along with the address and some other options, too, such as share, directions and even a star rating.

What’s your favourite feature of the new and improved Nokia Maps? Have you used the heat maps yet for ideas of where to go? Let us know, below.

Last year Nokia and Yahoo! joined forcesto create an alliance that leverages each others’ strengths in email, instant messaging, maps and navigation services. The purpose of the alliance is to provide consumers with access to world-class experiences on both PC and mobile devices.

Following on the successful transition of Yahoo! powering Nokia’s email service, Yahoo! is now making the switch to using the Nokia Maps platform. With a gradual rollout which is starting today in the United States and Canada, Yahoo! Maps is now amongst others benefitting from new features provided by Nokia Maps: latest maps with up-to-date location data/addresses, new routing options allowing users to avoid tolls and freeway, updated road networks and points of interest.

The Nokia Maps engine has been then customized by Yahoo! to offer a new, simplified layout and visual design with a maximized viewable area, enhanced business listings support, leveraging the improvements made to the Yahoo! local listings database, and a consistent interface across the Yahoo! network with the universal location widget, allowing users to search and select locations.

This platform switch is further proof of the world class platform expertise and scalable global infrastructure that Nokia has been building over the last couple of years in the location platform space. Other companies have also recognized Nokia’s leadership in that area. All over the world we are supporting partners like Foursquare, Yelp, VKontakte and Sina, to mention a few, in the development of innovative location services – for web as well as for native mobile apps.

In doing so, our partners benefit from our modularly usable platform. What does that mean? It’s quite simple: Every partner can use exactly those pieces of the platform that he needs. At the same time our global platform infrastructure is designed to scale – allowing us to partner with some of the largest companies in the world. You want a proof for that? Just check out Yahoo! Maps – now powered by Nokia.

Other Map-related Applications

In addition to its world-class, free walk-and-drive navigation for more than 100 countries worldwide, the Nokia Public Transport application tracks public transportation directly on a mobile device in more than 430 cities worldwide, including up-to-the-minute updates on bus and train routes for 45 cities. Nokia also introduced Nokia Pulse, which allows location-tagged updates and photos to be sent privately, adding location to conversations with the people that matter most. Nokia also showcased Nokia Live View, which turns the phone’s camera view finder into a reality augmenting tool. With Nokia Live View, a phone can be pointed to a building or street and the names of the places become superimposed over them, offering one click access to detailed information about businesses, restaurant or attractions. All the applications announced today are available at Nokia’s Beta Labs (betalabs.nokia.com).

Nokia also announced:
…
An agreement with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to develop a NFC-based smartphone ticketing solution to pilot on New York regional commuter trains starting before the end of 2011

Adding an inspired twist on social location, Nokia Pulse lets you instantly send location-tagged updates and photos to private groups of family and close friends. So syncing up in town and staying up to date is even simpler than sending a text message, but still just as private.

Nokia Pulsebrings your everyday conversations to life by automatically tagging photos and updates with your location.

Every conversation, from pickups and drop-offs to meet-ups, is as instant, private, and simple as sending a text, but far more useful and engaging. Nokia Pulse is integrated with Maps, so finding people nearby, discovering new places, and getting directions is a snap.

Nokia Maps Suite brings you the future of location-based services. Places helps you discover where to go and Public Transport shows the best way to get there with buses, trams and trains with worldwide coverage. Nokia Live View, the augmented-reality browser, turns your phone.s camera viewfinder into a new way to spot nearby attractions, shops, restaurants and places of interest. With Pulse, you can check in with the people you care about most—your family and close friends.

Wherever you are, you have access to everything you need to explore your surroundings, share special moments, and plan your next adventure.

Make a difference. Give feedback!

Please share your thoughts, questions, bugs, and suggestions in the feedback forum (after checking the Known issues). When submitting feedback, select the most appropriate sub-category to make sure the right developers see it.

It’s nice to feel like a local no matter where you are. Maybe you’re in London for Nokia World and have taken some time to see the sites, Places helps you find out where you are. Then you feel like having a coffee and use Live View to get information and reviews about the cafes closest to you. Enjoying your double cappuccino, you check in with Pulse and see that friends are in London for Nokia World too. Finally, you use Public Transport to find the quickest way to meet up with them. But how do you know all of the apps are up-to-date and that you have the latest and greatest from Nokia’s Location team?

We present to you the new Nokia Maps Suite for Symbian. It brings you all of the latest location applications in one easily downloadable package. The Nokia Maps Suite installer checks for the latest each app has to offer and automatically updates, optimizing performance. Today, Nokia Maps Suite is introducing a whole new range of apps: Places, Live view, Pulse and Public Transport, all of which can be installed together on your phone’s home screen. Be one of the first to try it!

Places

With one tap from your home screen, see where you are and instantly discover places around you listed in handy categories.

Pulse

An exciting new way to check in with the people you care about the most—your family and close friends. By default, it’s private and you don’t need to be part of a social network, simply add your email address and post. You can automatically add location to every update and receive instant notifications for new updates. Pulse is integrated with maps so you can easily discover nearby places, get directions and recommendations from trusted family and friends.

Public Transport

All of your commuter information and trip planning at your fingertips! You can choose from multiple route suggestions and follow the slick list of directions for buses, trams, underground or trains. Check the next departure times for the nearest station and any one you have in mind, and easily save your regular commutes to favourites.

Nokia Places helps you discover where to go faster. Simply open the app and instantly see what’s around. With just a tap or two you can turn places on the map on or off. Tap on the markers to see what the places are and how they are rated. Go to the details to read reviews, make reservations, and find your way there.

Have you ever wished you could spot the closest restaurant or ATM? Nokia Live View is a fun and easy way to discover what is around you. Simply launch the app on your phone and Live View will display the points of interests in the camera viewfinder view/ List view / Maps view.Nokia Live View connects you to what you.re looking for . and more . exactly when and where you want it. With Live View you can:

Select your interests in many different categories . Live View will filter the points of interests and present your choices

We would love to hear from you with feedback on the productand any enhancements that you could think of to make this a better product.

Please make sure to rate our service by answering the NPS question in the client. If you want to leave more detailed feedback you can use the forum here on Beta Labs. Our team will be monitoring the feedback and we respond to you in the forum.

Are you hooked on Nokia Live Viewyet? If not, we’re pretty sure you will be—because Live View changes the way you see the world around you. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, like a café, ATM, or train station. Just look through your phone’s camera viewfinder, and the Live View augmented reality browser actually shows you whatever you’re looking for.

Say you’re taking a taxi to meet friends at that new hot spot downtown. But when the driver drops you at the curb, you don’t recognize a thing. You know it must be close by, but where exactly? No worries. Just pull out your Nokia N8, launch Live View, and see exactly where the place is. It sounds like a gadget 007 might carry. But it’s already in your pocket. Just tap to call or navigate with turn-by-turn instructions. With Live View, you’ll probably beat your friends there. So share your location with them via email or SMS.

Live View can even help you spot new places of interest. Always looking for the best Korean BBQ on the block? Save your customized searches so you can explore even easier next time. And once you discover someplace new, you can read reviews, descriptions and destination information.

So what do you think? Has Live View saved you from wandering aimlessly? Helped you find something new and different? Share your stories!

We also offer worldwide Simple routing information. Simple routing uses the map data to calculate a heuristic route, based on the likely frequency of lines.Check out the list of citieswhere coverage is available.

What’s different from the last version?

We have increased our time-based coverage (before we only supported Berlin & Brandenburg) and added Simple routing for many cities all over the world. There’s also a new Stations nearby page (formally known as Departures) with all the stations and departure times around a selected spot. And the Journey details page visuals has been improved.

Explore cities in 3D with Nokia City Scene from Nokia Research Center. http://nokia.ly/q78Qhw Click on buildings to browse their stores and services, or use search to jump to what you are looking for. Connect to your social networks to find friends’ check-ins or share locations. Now featuring about a dozen US cities with coverage expanding both in the US and to Europe.

Explore cities in 3D with Nokia City Scene from Nokia Research Center. Click on buildings to browse their stores and services, or use search to jump to what you are looking for. Connect to your social networks to find friends’ check-ins or share locations. Now featuring about a dozen US cities with coverage expanding both in the US and to Europe.

The application combines NAVTEQ street imagery, building models and terrain data to create interactive panoramic street scenes. It uses building models to make buildings clickable, and to present information right on the building facade, so you can discover information just by browsing along a street.

You can use City Scene’s location aware search to jump directly to a panoramic view of the place you’re looking for, so you’ll recognize it when you go there. The application lists your friends’ Foursquare and Facebook check-ins so you can jump to where they’ve been. You can also share “postcards” of locations complete with street address (maybe suggesting a place to meet for coffee later). The Featured Cities list will grow automatically as NAVTEQ completes more drives.

We’d be really happy to hear your feedback about Nokia City Scene. If you’ve any comments or suggestions please visit our forum. Please check also the Frequently Asked Questions.

The next generation of Snapdragon processors is a family of all-in-one chipsets with the option for integrated multimode 3G/4G, differing numbers of CPU cores and the ability to support a range of device types.

Shown for the first time, Qualcomm’s Gobi solution provided the 3G/4G LTE connectivity of a Windows 8-based prototype PC. Qualcomm’s Gobi mobile Internet connectivity solution is a pre-certified multi-mode 3G/4G LTE module that makes it easy for OEMs to certify the connectivity of any Windows 8-based PC. By integrating a Gobi-based module into Windows 8-based PCs, Qualcomm will provide a fast, easy-to-use global connectivity solution for an untethered, productive user experience.

[summarized opinion in the end of the article:]
Windows 8 is a usable touch-screen tablet operating system, and it certainly has some compelling features when used on that kind of machine. The look of the software is different from what traditional Windows users are used to, but the operating system remains true to its PC roots: you can use it on a tablet, but you won’t need to.

Game on. After going through the Day 1 keynote for the Build event, I should say I’m pretty much convinced that Microsoft has got the equation correct. They corrected the Tablet part of the equation, and got the entire Cloud <-> Tablet stack in place, with proper platforms and a nice set of developer tools. And with out doubt, Windows 8 devices are going to be a definite competitor for iPad/iOS, and Microsoft has officially entered the post PC era.

… everything from “10-inch tablets to laptops to all-in-ones with 27-inch HD screens” will be able to ingest Win8 with ease. That’s a markedly different take than the folks in Cupertino have expressed, with an (admittedly limiting) mobile OS being chosen to run the tablet side of things. Only time will tell which mantra proves more viable, but we’re guessing the both of ’em will find varying levels of success.

With the introduction of OS X Lion, Apple gave us a glimpse at what a post-PC operating system might look like, and now Microsoft’s gone and pushed that idea to the limit. If Cupertino’s latest was a tease, than Windows 8 is full frontal. And we have to admit, we like what we see. Sure this may not be the final build, or anywhere near it, but for whatever flaws it may have, the UI being offered in this developer preview is really something special. Time will tell if the “one ecosystem to rule them all” approach will catch on, but for now it’s time to give props where props are due — at least until we can get our hands on a final build.

Oh, sure — you’ve already started digging into the upcoming Windows Store (or, at least what it’ll deliver), but Microsoft just revealed a cute little nugget about its future functionality here at Build 2011. In keeping with its mantra of making Windows 8 a one-size-fits-all affair, the Store will be home to both Metro-style apps (useful for tablets and desktops alike) as well as traditional Win32 programs.
…

There’s not a ton of details on this just yet, but Microsoft confirmed during its Build keynote today that Windows 8 devices equipped with an NFC chip will be able to use a tap-to-share feature to either send content from one device to another, or simply receive content from something like an NFC-equipped card.

Update: NXP Semiconductors has now confirmed that it “worked closely” with Microsoft to develop an NFC driver for Windows 8, and that it’s also supplied the NFC solution used in the Windows 8 tablets given out at Build. According to the company, the NFC support in Windows 8 includes things like device pairing (simply tapping to pair a Bluetooth headset, for example), data sharing, and the ability to transfer control from one device to another (such as during a video call). And that’s all to say nothing of the usual fare like interacting with an NFC-enhanced advertisement, not to mention other applications that will surely follow once it’s actually put into practice. The company’s press release is after the break.
[NXP’s NFC Solution Supports Windows 8]

… that PC comes complete with a second-gen Intel Core i5 processor, an 11.6-inch 1,366 x 768 Samsung Super PLS display, a 64GB SSD, 4GB of RAM, and a dock with a USB, HDMI and Ethernet ports.
[Super PLS (Plane Line Switching): see A Beautiful Display [Anandtech, June 13, 2011] from which the below photo is copied here to explain the improvement of Super PLS over previous S-IPS and I-IPS: ]

Staying true to its roots, the new OS implements the familiar keyboard commands users have become accustomed to over the years — you know, like CMD and Ctrl+F. And as for its update to Internet Explorer, MS has imbued its tenth iteration with the ability to switch between the much-hyped Metro-style UI and plain old desktop view — all according to your whimsy. Of course, Redmond’s instituted other sweeping changes across the platform, and you can check some of the highlights after the break.

All Windows 7 applications will run natively on Windows 8

Security update notifications have been minimized to the lower right of the log-in screen

There’s “no overlays” with Windows 8; Metro-style goodness is baked into the core

Both Metro-style and conventional Win32 apps will be soldin the Windows Store

Windows 8 devices equipped with an NFC chip will be able to use a tap-to-sharefeature to either send content from one device to another, or simply receive content from something like an NFC-equipped card.

Logins will use a photo-based system

Apps will be able to natively connect and understand one another (if written as such)

Built-in antivirus software will ship in Windows 8

There will notbe a different edition of Windows 8 for tablets, and presumably, not for Media Centers either

It’s unclear how many “editions” (Home, Professional, Ultimate, etc.) of Windows 8 there will be

… you’ll be able to download a copy of the Windows Developer Preview to your 32- or 64-bit x86 machine (no activation required) from dev.windows.com. Sorry, ARM hopefuls!

Microsoft launches Windows 8 preview [Computerworld, ]Microsoft will post the first developer preview beta of Windows 8 late on Tuesday, the company announced as it showed off the new OS running on a Samsung tablet.

Microsoft opens Windows 8 preview to all [Computerworld, ]Taking a different tack than it did three years ago, Microsoft has made a preview of Windows 8 available to anyone who takes the time to download it.

Microsoft leaves Windows 8 questions unanswered [Computerworld, the headline on the homepage of the Computerworld after the day earlier demonstration for journalists and analysts, while the article headline is a more natural one: “Windows 8 steps beyond the desktop”]On the Windows computer of the future, live tiles will replace icons, touch-based gestures will replace mouse clicks and semantic zooming will replace the arduous traversal through nested menus and folders.

Microsoft leaves Windows 8 questions unanswered, say experts [Computerworld, the same thing reiterated now with quoting analysts to support the Computerworld headline]Today’s long-awaited look at Windows 8 left analysts almost as perplexed as they were before Microsoft’s top Windows executive walked onto a California stage.

But if Microsoft was hoping to generate excitement about the upgrade, it succeeded, if only because of the fast-paced presentation by Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows group.

“It all looks great,” said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-Wash. research firm that specializes in tracking Microsoft’s moves. “If the goal was to get everyone excited, they did that. I was impressed by what they showed, by what they’ve done, but it’s too much to digest. I think I’ll have to watch the keynote [webcast] two or three more times to get it all.”

During the keynote, Sinofsky and other Microsoft executives spent most of their time showing off what they called the “Metro experience,” a tile-style, full-screen interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7 that’s intended to address the company’s lack of a true touch-based operating system.

“This is interesting for consumers,” added Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst who attended the keynote. “Certainly, Microsoft has to catch up on tablets [with Apple and Google] and get consumers excited about Windows again. I think this was a good effort at trying to do that.”

But for Cherry and Silver, who spend most of their time scrutinizing Windows for corporate clients, not consumers, there were tons of unanswered questions.

“We still don’t know when this will be shipped,” noted Cherry. “And we don’t know how stable Windows 8 is. Remember, these were all demos, and demos are carefully rehearsed.”

Silver echoed Cherry.

“They haven’t made the case yet that enterprises will want this,” said Silver. “I expect that they will have [enterprise-specific features] to show later, but at this point there are still lots of questions that haven’t been answered.”

Tops on his list: Can Microsoft successfully pitch Windows 8 as an upgrade for businessesthat have just recently migrated to its predecessor, Windows 7?

“Microsoft has implied that [Windows 8] would not drive an upgrade cycle,” said Silver, talking about corporations purchasing new computers to replace outdated machines and operating systems. “After all the work on Windows 7 deployment, organizations will think twice before deploying this everywhere,” said Silver. “They’re looking for a little respite, and planning to take a break because of migration fatigue.”

But Cherry was taken with the apparently smooth integration of the two interfaces: Metro and the traditional desktopfamiliar to users for decades.

“It appears that they will coexist well,” said Cherry. “I don’t envision a lot of problems for businesses there, although we’ll have to see how they handle group policies.”

Even so, he was hesitant to applaud Windows 8 until he knows more.

“The story they’re trying to tell — that they’ve re-imagined Windows — is a good story, but when I hear that they’re making major changes, I remember that changes lead to instability.”

Later today, Microsoft will distribute Samsung tabletswith a developer preview of Windows 8 to attendees at the BUILD Windows conference, which Sinofsky kicked off with the two-and-a-half hour presentation.

Microsoft has not said anything about when it will release a Windows 8 beta that will be available to the general public.

Microsoft is currently previewing Windows 8 at the BUILD conferenceand the web goes crazy. It appears the interest in Windows 8 is even bigger than it was for Window 7. Of course, this is due to the fact that Windows 8 is the biggest overhaul since Windows 95.

I compiled a collection of the best Windows 8 reviews that have been published today. I divided the link list into two sections. The first part covers general reviews, and the second part specific Windows 8 features.

The first blog post is from Steven Sinofsky (President of the Windows Division). Most interesting is that everyone will be able to download the developer’s prelease of Windows 8 later today.

Pre-written with full knowledge already:

ZDNet’s whole series (mostly pre-written with full knowledge already):

Windows 8 unveiledThis morning, Microsoft officially took the wraps off of Windows 8, unveiling its radically revised new operating system in front af an audience of software developers. I had a chance to get my hands on the new system (literally) last night. Here’s what you can look forward to.September 13, 2011 | 9:05am PDT

Five unanswered Windows 8 questionsBy the end of the day tomorrow, we’ll know much more about Windows 8. But some questions will remain unanswered, even after a thorough demo. Here are the top five on my list.September 12, 2011 | 10:00 AM PDT

winrumors whole series (some pre-written with some knowledge already):

Hands on with Windows 8′s new Metro experience Microsoft unveils Windows 8 to the world today, a reimagined Windows for the next-generation of devices and hardware. The new Start Screen and immersive Metro experience are designed to make experiences in Windows 8 “totally … 15 hours ago

Windows 8 Metro apps and Windows Store Microsoft’s new application model for Windows 8 comes coupled with a Windows Store for developers and end users. The Windows Store will play a big role in Windows 8 applications going forward. 15 hours ago

Windows 8: classic desktop features Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system sees a fresh start for the interface as a whole, but what about classic desktop? Don’t fear if you’re a die hard Windows power user. Microsoft has kept the fundamentals … 14 hours ago

Hands on: Windows 8 input options and pen computing
Microsoft has nurtured pen based computing inside Windows for a number of years, but what’s it like in Windows 8? The Windows 8 developer preview build includes the ability to use pen based devices. Microsoft … 14 hours ago

Hands on: Windows 8 File History backupMicrosoft’s backup options are changing in Windows 8. The developer preview of Windows 8 includes a File History feature that was previously known as “History Vault” during the early Milestone builds of Windows 8. File … 14 hours ago

Windows To Go: Run Windows 8 from a USB deviceMicrosoft’s Portable Workspace feature has been renamed to Windows To Go inside Windows 8. The feature allows Windows 8 to boot from a USB device. First discovered in leaked builds, Microsoft looks set to detail … 9 hours ago

Windows 8 Developer Preview now available to downloadMicrosoft’s Windows 8 Developer Preview is now available to download. The Windows developer center is now live and Windows 8 available to download in the following flavours: Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) DOWNLOAD (3.6 GB) … 6 hours ago

WinBeta whole series

Download the Windows 8 Developer PreviewThe moment we have all been waiting for has come to fruition. Microsoft has just uploaded the Developer Preview build of Windows 8. Check out the download links at the bottom of this post to grab the 32bit or 64bit versions.

Microsoft to be streaming the BUILD conference liveThere has been speculation on whether Microsoft will be streaming the BUILD conference live. Fortunately, Microsoft have confirmed the legitimacy of a LIVE stream starting from September 13th at 9AM PDT time.

Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 ScreenshotsWindows 8 Developer Preview has only been out for a few hours now but we have some screenshots for you that will give you an idea of what to expect, in case you are not planning on trying it out for yourself or your download is taking ages. Either way, we got you covered with some lovely screenshot action!

Microsoft’s Highlights Windows 8’s New FeaturesDuring the Build Developer’s Conference today in California, Microsoft showcased Windows 8 and detailed its new features. “We re-imagined Windows. From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise,” explains Steven Sinofsky. So what are the new features?

Windows 8 Screenshots: Start Screen, Keyboard, and moreWe’ve got a few new Windows 8 screenshots for you, directly from the Windows 8 demonstration at the Build developer’s conference. In these screenshots, we get to see the new start screen, the classic desktop, the new onscreen keyboard, and the new Metro-styled applications (mail, calendar, and photo).

Microsoft Reveals the Path to Windows 8 RTMMicrosoft revealed its plans for Windows 8’s release during the Build developer’s conference. We learned that Windows 8 will have only a few more milestones before going final. First we will have a beta, a release candidate, release to manufacturing, and finally, general availability.

Windows 8: Reset PC and Sync SettingsMicrosoft is revealing a ton of new information regarding Windows 8. This time, we learn about a feature that will allow you to reset your PC settings and another feature that allows you to sync your settings across all PCs that run Windows 8.

Windows 8: Screenshots of new Task ManagerDuring the Build Developer’s conference, Microsoft showcased the new task manager in Windows 8. At the demonstration, Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky stated that this new task manager was years in the making.

Silverlight and .Net are not dead, but Metro is the futureDuring the Build Developer Conference in California, Microsoft revealed that both Silverlight and .Net are not dead. Instead, those two platforms will be utilized to write classic and desktop apps for Windows 8, rather than the new Metro styled apps, which is Windows 8’s primary focus.

Microsoft Reveals the Path to Windows 8 RTMMicrosoft revealed its plans for Windows 8’s release during the Build developer’s conference. We learned that Windows 8 will have only a few more milestones before going final. First we will have a beta, a release candidate, release to manufacturing, and finally, general availability.‎